When my kids were little, I often had the strangest of experiences, at least for someone who was raised as I was, in a place small enough that every adult felt entitled to laying down the law (sometimes resulting in their getting a correction from my mother, because what I was doing was approved of in the family, if not in the village) so that if you stepped a foot out of the true path, you were likely to find yourself at the vortex of a converging tornado of grandmothers.
Sometimes, mostly when the kids were very young, and I was waiting on the playground for them to go in (I walked, so I always left enough time, and often this resulted in waiting for the teacher to let them in) I’d see a kid doing something dangerous to himself or others: Dancing on top of the six foot retaining wall; swinging a branch within two inches of another kid’s eyes. For the other stuff, like manners…. well, it was none of my business, and I wasn’t about to start a feud. But “danger to himself/herself and others” would get me to put my book away and hurry to the kid to say “No. Don’t do that.” in as firm a voice as I could.
The weird thing was the look I got back. Gape-mouthed, eyes wide, it would have been a look that was warranted if I’d told the kid “I’m an alien from Alpha Centauri.” A few of them gave me the key to their shock by saying “You can’t tell me no” or “You can’t tell me that” or “I do what I want.” Not one of them EVER told me “You’re not my mom” (Which is hilarious since my kids, when very young tried that at least once a year, like I’m that stupid.) Which meant it wasn’t a matter of correction by a stranger, it was a matter of “no one ever told me no.” (BTW without touching them, just with withering correction and contemptuous voice I dispelled the notions of those kids. Yeah, I was the person to go to for Kleenex and to get your shoes tied, but I also became the person that if you wanted to misbehave, you had to hide from. Which means most of the time it really was “NO ONE EVER TRIED TO CONTROL THEM.”
Yesterday, here, someone was speculating on the cluster fark of idiocy that our current “holy marxist rulers” have unleashed and said “Well, they didn’t expect to have to perform.”
But it’s not that. They never really intended to perform. You see, they do what they want. They should just “be” and be applauded for it.
Part of the issue is that no matter how you’ve been trained, humans need other humans to set boundaries. Piaget was wrong about that, to an extent. Sure, it is a developmental thing in childhood to realize that others are beings with self-will. But it can be forgotten has an adult, or restricted to a small set of people who are “real” where everyone else isn’t.
People who are isolated from other people go a little bit loopy. (An effect our idiot would be betters are shocked to find followed their idiotic lockdowns.) Sometimes “eccentric recluse harmless loopy” and sometimes “The dog is telling me to chop up the neighbors and put them in trash bags loopy.”
We are social apes, and we need the corrective reactions of others to realize when we’ve gone too far/too weird.
This is particularly true for people who consider themselves “good people” because their intentions are pure, and who never confront the demons inside themselves. (We all have them.)
The problem is that the rise of “mass industrial society” coincided with the left/Marxists seizing control of all communication, including the arts.
Look, Marxism and mass production is a marriage made in hell, one feeding into the flaws of the other. Perhaps it was inevitable, since Marxism is as much a product of the industrial revolution (and one man’s retardation) as it exacerbates illusions of central control.
But having established themselves in control of journalism and the arts by the middle of the last century — to an extent no one not in the field couldn’t even know. I mean, perfectly sane people think that non-Marxists are just not creative. (Casts an eye towards Hollywood. Yeah.) — leftism made itself a positional good. Every feedback from the mass education/information industrial complex told you that to be leftist was to be forgiven everything, to get away with everything and to be automatically, by fiat “good.”
And the problem with that is that no corruption, no evil, not unbridled wish for power would be punished, or even mentioned. To be leftist meant that your private peccadilloes would never be held before your eyes. And often those grew into crimes — looks at Clintons, Obamas, Bidens — and those too would go unpunished.
The problem is these are the children who were never told no. Except they’re not children.
Their unbridled century long indulging of their darkest wishes and urges has left them curiously unsatisfied, so they keep reaching for more and more.
At the same time, society has changed, and we can talk to each other outside their control.
Things like the election they had to steal in plain sight have to give them the cold grue. Not that they can process it, because no one has ever told them anything but that they’re perfect.
So they waver between imagining everyone else must be worse, and thinking that there is something wrong they don’t know.
But at the back of their minds, they know something is wrong. They know they are wrong. Which is driving them ever crazier.
The bad results are not unintentional. They’re spoiled children breaking the whole toy box because they weren’t allowed to beat the quiet little girl with the toy hammer. They might not confess this even to themselves, but they destroy because they’re throwing a massive tantrum.
The problem is this: Children and adults need feedback. For their own protection. Because there’s only so much society at large will tolerate, as Heinlein exemplified with the story of how to train a dog (child) in Starship Troopers.
You can’t let a puppy grow up making messes and excuse it because he’s just a puppy, and then at one take him outside and shoot him. Same with “juvenile delinquents” of course.
BUT–
The same goes for a political faction. You can’t let it go unpunished and praised for the most horrendous power grabs and evil, and tell them they’re good, without eventually having to deal with it.
I think at the back of their minds, dimly, they see it coming. But they don’t know what to do about it. After all, nobody ever told them no, and they are the good people who do what they want.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.
In the end we win, they lose. But it’s going to be a mighty rough patch in between.
According To Hoyt 
Sad but true.
Sometimes “eccentric recluse harmless loopy” and sometimes “The dog is telling me to chop up the neighbors and put them in trash bags loopy.”
How about both? 1. Akshully, my innate preference, on par with sexual preferences as being born with/unable to change, is that the druggies no longer be. 2. Once you get down to the brass tacks of implementation, it becomes clear that you would need popular support to carry out the whole program. What you can do on your own is so little that you might as well not bother, unless your motivation is coming from a much saner place than mine is.
I know full well that I’m not going to persuade a majority, and yet I let myself stay stuck on the path of trying to convince a majority. Partly, because my own issues let me use ‘maybe I am just really nuts here, if I cannot convince people’, and avoid committing to serious irreversible acts.
Definitely not a nice form of loopy. Possibly a harmless form of loopy, except to loopy solopists who cannot abide anyone not participating in their attempts to magically alter reality.
Anyway, on the wider point, that bit in Starship Troopers about spanking a baby with an axe.
Your obsession with the “druggies” has turned me away from most of your comments, but whether that means anything is up to you.
People turn to drugs because they’re in pain; either physically, or emotionally. For those of us who drink, how many of us have gladly taken one after an exhausting week of irritation at work, or because we lost someone dear to us? Guess what? There Is No Difference Between Us And Any Drug Addict. Except they can’t stop because it feels better to be drugged out than to continue to feel the pain. Not all of us are Captain Kirks who need that pain, who deliberately make sure that there’s some pain in our lives to help provide motivation. I know what it’s like to have seemingly endless drudgery and uselessness and try to drown it in beer, whiskey, vodka, tequila, and rum. Thankfully I had someone care enough to drag me out by the scruff of my neck and I had enough common sense left to listen to them. The government war on drugs is being managed by idiots, fought by unthinking drones, and exploited by monsters with degrees in “Justice”. It’s deliberately designed to fail, and to spread the misery.
Sure, you can blame the cartels, the gangs, the pushers. But please don’t blame the users, the addicts. They’re victims trapped in a mirror house and can’t see the way out.
And it has failed to such a level of perfection that *by the logic of the drug warriors* the drug warriors need to be dragged out into the town square and put to death.
No.
That dehumanizes the addicts.
I know too many people who clawed their way out, and too many people maimed by drug addicts who kept diving back in, to pretend it’s the same as alcohol.
When the norm is the same as the far edge cases, they are not the same– even when the drugs are outlawed, when nobody isn’t aware they’re addictive, when it takes deliberate ignorance to not know that they will kill you after dragging you insane, at best– the damage of those stealing to support their drug issues is a massive crime problem, while those doing so for their alcohol issues lines up with those stealing for non-physical addictions, like gambling.
But hey, you don’t trust me?
Then trust the drug addicts.
They choose the expensive, illegal, and deadly option over alcohol.
THEY know it’s not the same.
In my life I’ve managed to mostly avoid druggies, but the few I’ve known have NOT been “in pain”.
Rather, they LIKED it. Easy way to feel good and avoid the normal cares of everyday life. Like a Friday night sixpack that goes on forever.
And then there are the surveys of street addicts, where 90% said they prefer to stay on the street and stay stoned rather than get help, if help means they have to sober up.
And that’s when I lost all sympathy.
*nod*
They want to feel good— which is a very different thing– and they’ll sacrifice much greater goods to get it. Goods that aren’t theirs to sacrifice included, and no infrequently prioritized.
Pain comes in all shapes and sizes. And it’s often good at hiding or masquerading as something else. And every druggie I’ve known had some form of pain. Yeah, of course they liked the drugs. Of course they wanted to feel good. For them, “normal” wasn’t bearable. And of course the street addict prefer to stay there, stuck in their modern equivalents of opium dens. Sympathy doesn’t help understanding. Empathy might get you there better. You understand what a “mystical” experience is right? Until you’ve been there, you can’t even imagine it. And once you’ve been, you can’t explain to someone anyway. Count your blessings.
And no, I’m not making excuses for violent behavior while under the influence, nor for the road of thefts and self destruction many take to get their next fix. They have the right to go to hell in a hand basket; we have the right to defend ourselves from them.
Is there a living human being without some form of pain?
By that definition, everyone has pain.
And then the difference becomes how or IF one deals with it. By the criterion of “it’s always pain” — druggies are ducking out of dealing with it.
(Had my share and more. Did not become a druggie.)
Theodore Dalrymple had addicts tell him that their grandmothers died, and so they became addicts. He would point out that his grandmother died, and most people’s grandmother died, and without his, or most people’s, becoming addicts.
THIS.
And I remember him mentioning that in one of his columns.
Sometimes it’s “and.”
My brother is an example. He’s younger than I am, and basically an invalid. COPD, neuralgia….He’s on oxygen and can barely walk.
If anyone is in a high-risk group for WuFlu, it’s him. But he doesn’t know if he was vaccinated after the last round of pneumonia or not. He’s doing slow suicide and I don’t know if I’m angrier or grieving.
As I understand it, at lot of the drug deaths now are fentynal poisonings. China is making it and shipping it here in bulk, it’s stupidly cheap and it is uncontrollably strong, so apparently a lot of dealers as simply packing it up in whatever and selling it under whatever name people will buy it under.
So there is the problem of people destroying themselves with drugs, but there is also the problem that dealers are spiking their stuff with extremely dangerous stuff to up their margins.
There’s also the aftermath of the opioid prescription spree, and the associated black market. drug distribution networks that created, and about a dozen other major messes all tangled up into one great big witches brew of nasty.
I’d say the thing that most needs to be dealt with, and the broadest agreement is that we must cut the stream of fentynal products into the supply train. Of all the drugs, that one seems to be the one that kills people in lot batches.
Am seeing billboards in the Memphis area telling people Naprosyn works on fantasy, so they should always carry it…
Naproxene and fentanyl.
WordPress Delenda Est.
Apparently, when China did the partial economic shutdown,they stopped supplying precurser chemicals to South America, and the supply here of coke, etc., decreased some.
I don’t know it is deliberate, but it would fit the flavor of crazy of those trying to operate the PRC.
A mess. I see no answers. I don’t see a sane answer, and my insane answers are obviously unrealistic, and would not fix things. Mental health tragedies have few answers at aggregate scale.
Most of the increase in deaths is from dusting stuff with fent, yes– that’s because what they tend to report as “drug deaths” are overdose deaths that did not involve alcohol.
(Everyone who just went: “wait, it’s really easy to OD on opioids with alcohol”– yes, welcome to the ‘accidental over dose with pain killers and alcohol’ face-saving story.)
They don’t sell it as a different drug, they *add it to* already offered drugs, because people praise it as “good stuff”…until the way that you can’t divide “high” from “dead” by eye alone with fentanyl, even when you’re dusting, gets them dead.
Killing yourself via walking into traffic, trying to steal copper from a hot central power station, organ failure, etc– those aren’t drug deaths, although they may be added to drug related deaths, or just piled under “possible alcohol related” because nothing else damages the liver but alcohol…when your funding is on the line.
The “opioid prescription spree” was actually… drum roll…. fentanyl.
Which is a prescription opioid.
Which is why, AFTER they talked about “opioids” being such a big issue*, they’d later mention that only a tiny fraction of those who were addicted to “opioids” had gotten started on ANY prescription, even one they stole from grandma. Focusing on “opioids” (if you say prescription the first time, people don’t look too close the later times) is also a very handy way to roll heroin in to the total.
The DEA told them (on record, to congress) that it had nothing to do with the legal drugs, and that going after the pain killer manufacturers would just result in forcing a bunch of sick people to suffer, but there’s a lot more money to be made in going after legal companies than going after China and their drug-smugglers. When it happened exactly as they were told it would, they called the guy back and yelled at him for the results he TOLD THEM would happen….
* to make it more fun and interesting, when fentanyl and variations got started (sometimes mentioned as “elephant tranqs” in the news– it’s not very accurate) they were sometimes identified as heroin deaths, because that was more common and it will ping a heroin test.
Interesting. Most of my information is largely second hand, so subject to munging, errors and simple bad sourcing.
My closest contact with it was there was a period when everyone seemed to want to prescribe codine any time I did something that involved pain. But I’m also pretty paranoid about habit forming compounds* so I avoided them like the plague.
*I have no tolerance for anything. Fortunately I apparently have the superliver so whatever it is usually clears out quick, but when I have alcohol, I have the hangover up front…
Codeine is good for certain short term uses, but apparently it makes people super-angry and brittle and depressed after using it for painkiller purposes for more than a short time.
So yeah, the one person I knew who was on prescribed codeine for years should probably have been prescribed serially a set of different drugs. But no.
It’s not like news stories usually give enough information to GET decent information– they’ll decide to focus on the relatively tiny and already-strongly-countered group of folks who doctor-shop for a relatively safe source of drugs instead of the usually-cartel-and-more-organized-gang-backed drug dealers, and abuse the heck out of the information to support that thing. It’s about engaging emotion, not giving information.
But I know folks here can identify the tricks that they use, and will look out for those tricks the next time. Or at least one of the next times– part of why I like print is it’s so much harder to slide stuff in like you hit “synonym” on the keyboard, when the speaker is actually equivocating.
/wry
I’ve got a similar rant about the objectively false idea that ‘cellphones cause most accidents,’ which is a mutation of the data-point that distraction is involved in the largest single percentage of accidents. Someone standing waiting for the light who is hit by a bicyclist they didn’t see would be a ‘distraction involved,’ because they were looking at the crossing light instead of looking for someone illegally biking on the sidewalk.
I swear, it’s like dealing with the flippin’ fey in a storybook.
I like the ‘alcohol-involved traffic accident’.Completely sober you driving your buddy who’s had one too many home from the pub, get into a fender bender with another completely sober driver – voila alcohol-involved traffic accident.
The RCMP did this in the ’80s when they were pushing gun control. If there was a firearm anywhere around, even if no firearm was used, it went into the books as “gun related crime”. Had your mailbox hit by some drunk and your grandpop’s old shotgun is in a trunk in the attic? Gun related crime. There was a gun present at the scene, you see.
*Smiles, with teeth*
::Gives a friendly wave. With a horseshoe and iron sheers that may or may not have been blessed.::
?dryly/
You do realize that being a cobbler means I have to work with the oul iron, mm?
😉
Doesn’t fix the whole blessing thing.
I’ve even got churchbells and Gregorian chanting on CD….
(OK, so some of it is doing a cover of James Bond themes. But it’s Gregorian chanting!)
Considering I’m Reformed …. going to have to try harder! 😛
Then you wouldn’t be one of those who lies for the joy of violating the truth, would you?
nope. Lies burn. LIke other … substances.
Well, I’ve heard that plenty of the “Good Folks” can tell the truth in a way that listeners will believe that they are saying something else.
IE What the humans hear (or think what is said) is different than what the Good Folk actually meant. 😉
*shrugs* and that is the peril in dealing with us – particularly with those who are in the courts. However, things might go better if you would fecking stop running roads through our doorways, and trying to catch me and steal my nonexistent pot of gold! Jayzus.
Gold?
I have all the gold that I want or need.
I see no reason to chase after one of the “Wee Folks” to try to get more (whether or not they have any). 😉
I point to the failing of modern English. sibh, not tú.
?
Apparently, this is going to turn into a kids game of *A does X – B sez, “nuh-uh, I have a forcefield!” 😆
The reason there are no fey around is they took one look at this future and NOPEd as far away from Earth as possible screaming all the way.
You wish. We’re still here.
And let’s face it; “told to Congress”? They probably get off on the increased suffering.
Back in the ’80s I worked as a unit clerk on a cancer floor. I have to admit, I never understood why they were worried about folks who were likely terminal getting hooked on narcotics. With adequate pain relief they were more likely to survive the treatments, and I would think we could worry about their addiction then if they lived. But no, even then, we had to worry about dying people getting hooked on morphine and its derivatives.
Of course now they claim that pain is “the sixth vital sign”, and are always asking you about it. But heaven forfend you actually want to have your pain treated.
At least in theory, the actual concern was and is that folks will be recorded as getting pain killers they did not, and the rest will show up on the street.
You have an even better grasp of how very upset that makes folks– because they didn’t just take the extra, in cases they’ve caught, they swapped all the pain killer out. So you can have a completely innocent doctor going nuts because his cancer patient acts like twice the level of painkiller that should be helping is nothing but water…because it actually *is* nothing but water.
There’s also the ever popular “pain treat them to death” option that sometimes gets noticed, though that’s more of a gets-caught-incidentally thing.
The problem being that here, we were dealing with inpatients who got their meds IV, so they weren’t likely to take the stuff out to resell on the street. And the nursing staff weren’t doing it either. But the docs wouldn’t up the doses when patients clearly needed it, because we couldn’t possible let the person with a few weeks to live get hooked.
The ones I heard of were cartel-suppliers– the stolen stuff went to labs to be made into street stuff.
I would completely believe a doctor being worried about someone with weeks to live getting “hooked,”t hough. (I may be cynical about doctors….)
I remember hearing a family member complain because their loved one was in hospice with a week to live and “they might get addicted” was used to explain why the loved one got ibuprofen instead of opioids (which treatment didn’t even take the edge off the pain, apparently.)
Upstairs neighbor OD’d on fentanyl and heroin a couple years ago. He was a pharmacist and knew *exactly* what he was doing. So did his girlfriend and his mother. They simply enabled him.
One wonders if the pharmacist started off with “ow, threw my back out, going to the doctor is a hassle, I’ll just fiddle the books and help myself to a few pills” and worked up from there.
I knew a veterinarian who died that way… back injury and chronic pain, began self-medicating from his own Rx cabinet, and one day he OD’d. (Dunno to what degree that might be because of how California clamped down on Rxs for painkillers.)
19th century doctors were notoriously morphine addicts. A lot of the claptrap about its being a medical issue stems from them. (Romancing the Opiates by Theodore Dalrymple is good.)
Am familiar with the author from his Takimag columns… he seems to have a highly realistic view of the criminal underclass.
If there is insufficient evidence to determine, and the government has its paws in it, assume they have managed to come up with a way to make things go as perfectly wrong as possible.
Only a rule of thumb, but in the rare times it is wrong it will usually only be a matter of degree.
There have been some findings recently that between the lockdowns restricting people’s normal access to medical treatment and the clampdown on opoids for chronic pain, people started turning to the black market including fentanyl.
I’m shocked! Shocked I say!
Maybe.
Hear tell a lot of doctors get themselves in trouble thinking that they are smart enough to dose themselves.
Easy to think, I’ve had a bunch of courses, I’m making the big bucks, I understand how all this stuff works.
Issue with self medication of certain compounds, judgement is in the brain, and if the brain doesn’t work, judgement is impaired. A doctor or pharmacist who doesn’t understand this, and doesn’t set up some sort of accountability to mitigate, is in trouble before the first dose.
There are good comparisons one could make to show the difference between alcohol and other drugs. This is just about the worst one it is possible to make.
Not in a world where the core instruction given to alcoholics is that they have to change their friends and usual haunts or they will go back to it, and that they should never, ever, ever consider themselves “cured”.
With alcoholism, though, the unfair fact is that genetics are a lot of it.
There are people who can do problem drinking, or even binge drinking, and never become alcoholics. They don’t need the alcohol; they just do dumb things with it. Sometimes they have to learn how to stop doing dumb things, or stop drinking too much.
Whereas most people who become alcoholics are basically having a totally different experience with alcohol. It’s not, “Yeah, weird taste, interesting effects, whatever. This beer kinda stinks.” It’s “ooooooh, I feel this beauuuuuutiful goooolden rushhhhhhh, when can I have more?” Even little kids who just get a sip. (Whereas most little kids are like, “Yuck! Phew! No!” or “Whatever.”)
I like alcohol. And it helps me sleep. After 9/11 I used it as a sleep aid for a month, then stopped, cold turkey. Never felt the need for it.
It’s more like chocolate. It cheers me up when I’m having a shitty day, BUT I don’t NEED it.
Weirdly the things I have no resistance to are far weirder. One of them is yogurt.
Wine takes the edge off for me. But I can only drink a mouthful so I put mineral water in it. I also get the hangover upfront (very bad) if I drink more than a half a glass.
I don’t get drunk, and I don’t get hangovers. Thank you Portuguese genes.
A reason to be jealous of those genes 🙂 My hangovers especially with tequila are epic.
I did that with beer (before we found out all the things I was allergic to included wheat). After something less than a bottle (and that over more than an hour) the beer starts tasting funny and if I finish the last few sips I will have a glorious hangover, and have never even been tipsy. We found out later that I’m allergic to brewer’s yeast.
Yes, I am allergic to a lot of foods. I found out recently. Grapes are okay for me. I do have to be careful of most fermented foods–only a little bit. My big problems are soy, avacados, legumes, dairy, and now potatoes. I will miss it all. potatoes and those type of vegetables causes my arthritis pain to flair. If I don’t eat them, I don’t have as much pain.
I’ve never found any alcoholic beverage I could stand. Keep getting told it’s an “acquired taste” or something and I find myself unable to acquire it.
Coffee, beer- same thing with me. Haven’t acquired the taste. As for non-beer alcohol- a good merlot or malbec goes down easy. Hard liquor of any type needs to be in something like a pina colada or strawberry daiquiri to disguise the taste of whatever alcohol is in it.
“It’s an acquired taste!”
“Why would I ever want to acquire it?”
My thoughts exactly when it comes to alcohol. Outside the odd sake or Mike’s Black Cherry Lemonade there’s very little I enjoy. Besides, I do enough stupid and awkward stuff dead sober. Why would I want to get drunk and do even bigger and more awkward stupid stuff?
Good. More for me.
Someone has been jumping up and down on alcohol vs genetics:
https://themedicalbiochemistrypage.org/ethanol-alcohol-metabolism-acute-and-chronic-toxicities/
Been ages since I paid any attention, but I vaguely recall that in some people the liver preferentially utilizes alcohol over glucose, hence the big genetic overlap between alcoholism and diabetes.
Alice Cooper relates how he was hooked beyond recall with his first beer, and that it was unquestionably genetic (runs in his family).
The major difference between alcohol and other drugs is we evolved a path specifically for neutralizing it. It’s just not fully complete and we can’t entirely handle the by products yet.
It’s fundamental utility to people is it kills everything in it.
We have a lot poisons we enjoy eating because they kill everything else better. The entire category of “spicy food” comes down to the question “how do we deploy mass chemical warfare on parasites without killing ourselves?”
The point of some spicy food seems to be, “How close can we come to killing ourselves, and still survive?” 😛
Hot peppers are a case of “Let birds eat the fruit and spread the seeds, while keeping mammals from eating the fruit and destroying the seeds.” Then we featherless bipeds came along and double-subverted it.
I might care if it came within a thousand miles of pretending that alcohol is the same as drugs; not doing the two different standards in the same argument thing.
The government war on drugs is being run by people who would become unemployed should the government win the war on drugs. just sayin.
a) It is not just a /government/ war. Often enough, the use behavior occurs with other behavior that people might be killed to stop.
b) So, it is another case of ‘war is not the exception, peace is the exception’, confounded with the formal legal system’s attempt at a government monopoly on force.
c) Modeling it statically, one could spout off about ‘peace’ resembling a bunch of Mike Browns running rampant everywhere. (Which is probably not correct. But there is definitely more than one form of governmental meddling going on.)
d) It basically comes down to the local consensus on what behaviors ought to be tolerated.
e) Since the cultural consensus on even alcohol is not uniform across the United States, this is another case of the weird peace consensus in America. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense according to theory.
What I always find amazing is that to be a drug or alcohol counselor advising people with drug and alcohol addictions is that you have to be a “recovering” addict of alcoholic. Us people who’ve never had a problem aren’t invited into that club.
I mean- who better to tell people not get drunk and stupid then people who’ve gotten drunk and stupid….
I think of it sort of as hiring an engineer to design your bridge because one he designed failed- so he learned….
Actually, it’s like having a preacher who smoked and drank and ran around with loose women and got into fights before he found Jesus. He’s already heard all the excuses and used most of them, so you can’t shock him and he’s really hard to con.
(Actually had that guy as a minister. One of the best).
With the difference that preachers have to try to be all things to all men, while a counsellor for specific problems can deal with a subset of them.
I think in some ways it is a bad idea, and in some ways it is a good idea.
Good idea, you have counselors who have more than an abstract theoretical knowledge, and have some of the insights from wrestling around with the problems from the inside.
Bad idea, there are several types of habit/judgement that will result in /avoiding/ drug problems; Someone who got into substance problems may have been missing /all/ of those habits at the time, and may only be able to advise on the one they got patched up into working order.
Also, if you have a substance whose survivors are rare, you will be less likely to find potential counselors who are very functional human beings.
I think, generally, there isn’t a way to pick counselors that won’t have problems of some sort.
There’s also a risk of confusing personal weaknesses or mental hacks for universal ones– the most obvious examples of this are seen in weight loss programs, for something both common and notoriously controversial.
But worse, because it’s an even bigger chunk of their self-worth that they have overcome their demons and will help others out… so if it doesn’t work for you, and they’re not very secure, that’s an attack on something very survival oriented.
Yeah, see some of my saltiness.
I’m not entirely secure in some things that have been pretty survival oriented for a long time.
I try to give good counsel. There are a lot of ways that I can be extremely bad at it.
Talking to people about anything difficult gets unpredictably hard enough for me to do at all, or carry out in a measured way, that I am unreliable, and would be very bad at as a full time occupation.
I very much want to help people. I would spare them a lot of what I’ve gone through, or help them get out, if I can.
I get asked to help people. I try to help. Maybe sometimes it works better than what I know of happening?
There is a reason I want people to be discriminating when they listen to me, why I want them to weigh my words as one of several different possibilities that they consider. I want people to be listening to other people, saner people, people who can serve as a more reliable support network.
It is just that I know some things about being crazy, and about muddling forward with certain types of project that, when I did them, were not a very good idea. I keep my own counsel about the wisdom of some of these projects, so other people* actually suggest folks talk to me, because I look good on paper. And this is the type of project at best where one person’s success is not going to be a reliable guide to your own success.
The bureaucracies very much do not have a formula for matching people who need advice to people who would give the right advice for them. We are mistaken whenever we think that bureaucracies are good at this stuff. All we can do is try our individual best, speaking to other individuals.
*I have a couple of business colleagues who have mentored me. I have not told them some of my reservations about the fundamentals of the business. I’ve just gotten passed two more names of people that it is thought that I can help. I am really glad that if I do not reach out for a month, it will not hurt much my ability to give useful advice. I won’t say the what the business is, but because of current events, I am sometimes freaking out about the potential troubles with the fundamentals. Issue is, things are kinda bad for every occupation, so ‘go here, it is safe’ is not advice I can provide.
Anyway, at home mom sounds like it may be a relatively healthy occupation for you, because you can trust your husband enough to talk to him about the really important things. It is not normal, or broadly socially acceptable, to suggest that picking colleagues might be worth the discretion appropriate to a choice of spouse. Definitely, we should talk about prioritizing discretion in the job search much more than we do.
I also have an extended family with several folks where we can yell at each other, and be back to speaking normally two minutes later.
It helps a lot, and holy cow do I wish I could loan my family to a lot of you folks….
Sounds awful.
::shrug::
I much prefer it to the fake smiles and cutting-people-down gossip. My family drags issues out and beats them to death in the open– even the stuff that isn’t solved is at least understood, which honestly pisses off some of the married-ins who thrive on drama.
Most of the family Issues we’ve had were from married-in who brought their “well you should just know” nonsense with them.
There’s some stuff that’s handled quietly, but that’s by being warned what we all know but are supposed to act like we don’t. (The “I don’t want to talk about it” type things someone has, for example.)
The drama sorts tend to fail to pass on the warnings, then get upset you didn’t know what they didn’t tell anybody…..
Yeah, I’ll take the honest and open argument about the subject, instead of fake smiles and whispered attacks on the person.
Ah, I was thinking more along the lines of never being able to know when an argument was going to start/end.
Nah, hearing loss runs in the family *and* most folks are half deaf anyways– think Italian with slight less hand waving.
We didn’t have a drug problem until we tried one more insane attempt at prohibition. We didn’t learn the first lesson, so we have to repeat the lesson until we do get it. Drugs ARE a problem, but prohibition is NOT the solution. You get recruitment when you have a 10,000x markup. You have that markup thanks to making it illegal. The Swiss figured it out, why can’t we?
Drugs ARE a problem
Yes, and IMO most people who are pro-legalizing said drugs don’t talk about “how they are going to solve the drug problem after legalization”. 😡
You get recruitment when you have a 10,000x markup.
If that were so, smuggled cigarettes would not be one of the many profit-streams of the drug gangs.
I don’t know if the records is still in place, but for a while the largest single value drug bust in Washington state– a very popular illegal drug smuggling area– was tobacco.
There’s also the issue that if there was no drug problem before drugs were outlawed, they would not have gotten support for outlawing it. The assumption that folks in the past were stupid and/or hateful simply doesn’t fly.
One can believe that the problems can be better fixed otherwise, but insisting they didn’t exist just means you will repeat them– and when there is an active opposition, it means you’ll be starting at ground zero while your opposition has roughly a century worth of learning.
I think, as one pro-pot-legalizer pointed out a decade and more ago, part of the difficulty people have with a lot of “legalize it, then we solve the social problems” argument is this. Weed today isn’t the weed of the 1950s and early ’60s. K2, synthetic pot, meth, the psychoactive drugs . . . are not what LSD was back in the ’60s.
No legalization advocate I’ve heard (aside from one heroin person) has given a good cost-benefit analysis of what happens to parts of society and certain regions if all those things, or even just pot and the opium derivatives, are made legal. Who pays for medical care, and psychiatric care, and folks injured by DUI driver, or by people in psychoses? The property damage? The one heroin advocate said, “Hey, if folks OD, let them. If they die, they die.” Ooooohhhkay. Who cares for their kids, those who do have children?
::nodding, sadly::
Washington State folks know who pays for the property damage.
::points at car insurance rates::
And the psychiatric care….or lack of it.
::points to the crime related to “they’re crazy, catch them, charge them, give them a light sentence because they’re crazy and release them to go do it again until they, say, go to Portland and execute a guy in broad daylight for political affiliation::
************
Unrelated: if anyone is wondering why I’ve (tried to) switched to : instead of * for describing actions in comments, there’s been a tendency for websites to start using * to trigger italics, and I don’t like how that looks most of the time.
Why not just use <:blockquote> and </blockquote>?
Because blockquote via html 1) doesn’t work everywhere, and 2) doesn’t convey what was previously (since at least the mid-90s) conveyed by * emotes.
That’s “Markdown syntax”, a quick and easy way to create simple html tags. Personally, I wish more sites would use it, Facebook especially. All the common *asterisks* and _underscores_ and /slashes/ methods are just plaintext methods for simulating emphasis that should be italics, bold, underline, etc.
https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax#emphasis
It’s still annoying when you aren’t using them for easy HTML tags, because you have HTML tags and are looking for something else…..
/end get-off-my-yard mode
Youtube comments:
*bold*
_italics_
–strikeout– (that’s a double hyphen, if WP converts it to an mdash per usual) however this does leave one of the hyphens visible on each end.
Note that all must be surrounded by spaces, or they’ll affect text beyond the intended (or if punctuation is adjacent, fail to work).
Dunno what they call their markup, other than “inconsistent with anywhere else”.
grrrrrr
Actually dealing with the crimes that happen, plus trying almost literally anything else than what we are doing now with the truly crazy’s would solve about 90% of the many-and-varied “social issues”.
Would make what was left solvable with mere human efforts rather than “pray for either a miracle or an asteroid”.
I suspect it’s going to be neck and neck for how much damage was done between Rachel Carson’s lies, and the “all mental health treatment is oppression” nonsense.
Hm….maybe part of the crazy on the left is to try to deal with the no-really-they’re-crazy stuff? Sort of like how they recognized that hook-up culture isn’t healthy, but they can’t identify a sane response to it because of philosophical starting points?
Don’t know who Rachel Carson is.
It wouldn’t be the first time a totalizing ideology stared bending all non-euclidean when it encountered a part of reality which refused to fit.
That you don’t know her name honestly delights me, because it means she’s losing some cultural push. I was being mildly depressed when I searched the name to make sure I hadn’t pulled the wrong one off the mental shelf. (See also: I am HAPPY when people don’t recognize Charles Manson, young Stalin, insert horrific criminal here. It’s right up there with mass shooters being known only as “that loser who shot up–” )
Silent Spring gal, which pushed the questionable stuff supporting getting rid of DDT.
So I probably shouldn’t try to rattle off as many names as I can think of off hand? 😛
Though I’m not sure I’d take me for a good sense of what names are widely recognized…..
The harm she does can continue even if she is forgotten.
But with the name fading, so does the emotional impact– and since that’s what it used for juice, that’s good.
Rachel Carson is the Silent Spring lady, IIRC.
Yep, response is in moderation…. not sure if because of mention of a 60s and 70s “family” or mention of a leader of the country now identified as Russia, the one who didn’t pull his own son out of jail. Could be the specific chemical that was banned as a result of said book….
Am tempted to spam the system to find out, but refraining for now. 😀
The problem with that argument is that it is the drug warriors admitting that they have successfully perma-fucked civilization until the end of time.
Which, by the logic used by many of them, means every single one has earned public execution.
Wrong argument. And wrong arguments from the other side as well. The better question would be whether it can be successfully controlled, or if it is just another delusion of control like all the others (and also: what secondary effects does the enforcement cause?). Why would this one specific topic suddenly break the iron laws of how government works when nothing else throughout history has?
Considering this is a cultural problem, it is not reasonable to think it can be solved through law without a level of brutality that no free society can even begin to approach without self destructing. And the endless attempts to apply the wrong tool are actively interfering with the ability for society to make the required adaptions.
Careful with that. Because if you don’t have a limiting principle to keep it from cascading over all human activity — that you can get everyone else to agree with — what you are unwittingly arguing for is to rip the door off hell.
I know I’m going to regret asking this, but what on earth are you talking about?
You seem to be talking about something you think is both common and widely accepted, but the only thing it somewhat resembles is REASON magazine’s demonization of anyone who supports something they don’t like at the moment.
Which part?
Your “drug warrior” archetype.
I figure TXRed can deal with the lack of engaging with arguments made just fine on her own.
In short, the people who think the war on drugs has been a success, or if it hasn’t been a success it is purely because they haven’t septupled down enough times and there is no possible way they could have made any mistakes anywhere or that they are chasing an impossible problem.
They are also the ones who think drug dealers tear apart society, and therefore should be executed.
I AM NOT SAYING DRUG DEALERS ARE GOOD PEOPLE.
I AM NOT SAYING DRUG DEALERS ARE GOOD PEOPLE.
I AM NOT SAYING DRUG DEALERS ARE GOOD PEOPLE.
I AM NOT SAYING DRUG DEALERS ARE GOOD PEOPLE.
But if “tear apart society” is the standard for execution…… holy fuck are we going to be killing a lot of people.
Plenty of people (including some I respect) have said that the current war on drugs isn’t working.
But I haven’t heard (especially from you) of what they thinking is a better way to fight the drug problem.
You are just repeating nonsense.
Well there is the thing: I don’t think it can be fought. At least not in anything which people would call “a drug war”.
The solution is going to be some mixture of a cultural belief that you don’t mess with that stuff, plus parents actually doing their job.
Insisting that anyone who criticizes a current method of dealing with something must also have a complete solution ready to implement is an isolated demand for rigor. It is also the argument of the ecotards who demand a solved model of climate before considering not using the one which has zero connection to reality.
God forbid anyone admit that there are things we simply don’t know yet…
The solution is going to be some mixture of a cultural belief that you don’t mess with that stuff, plus parents actually doing their job.
A bit better but until people like you start PUSHING THAT SOLUTION on a wide scale, legalizing hard drugs IS NOT THE WAY TO GO!
And no, we aren’t expecting you to have a Perfect Solution but we do expect you to Talk More About How You Would Fix The Problem than you do about the problems with the current system.
As for the “God forbid anyone admit that there are things we simply don’t know yet…” strawman, we see little evidence of you or the other “legalize hard drugs” folks actually researching what might work.
Sorry but it is easy to complain about stuff but harder to actually do something.
You and others are Just Complaining and NOT DOING ANYTHING about the problem.
IE You’re just complaining and we’re heard too much complaining.
We want to know What You Are Going To Do About the Drug Problem.
I’m not a druggie [and don’t even drink], I don’t have kids yet so I can’t say I’m doing that at this time.
I hope we can do this the relatively peaceful way, but the mechanisms to do it are so damaged that it is difficult at best. I fear we will have to take the Former Soviet Republic method: go through all the hell and horror that everyone rightly wants to avoid, and that is what builds the cultural antibodies.
There is an oncoming twist which I have in the back of my head, but I never remember it in arguments: remember the collective pants-shitting over 3D printers when The Enemy realized they could be used to do an end run around gun control?
Same thing is coming for drugs. I don’t know if it will be five years or fifteen, but in the foreseeable near-future a choice will have to be made between ending the drug war as we know it and trying something else vs halting all technological development.
The answer I expect to see when it happens is to attempt to halt tech, but reality gets a vote and blows the whole thing sky high.
Nothing is stopping you from pushing non-governmental ways to keep people off of drugs (or help them get off of drugs).
It’d be plenty of work but it would be worth doing.
All I’m hearing is complaints that “it can’t be done”.
*thinks on what he actually said* no, I didn’t go into what I should have…
I *do* think “it can be done”, so long as we are talking about “keep drug use from being rampant and destructive”*.
But I think the ways it can be solved are closely analogous to the invisible hand: you can badly predict broad trends and a few obvious options (like parents teaching their kids (which requires that they first give a shit and second do not consider lying to their kids a moral duty (both of which are….. not common at this time (but slowly recovering)))). But try to predict with any real precision, or proscribe a general solution for everyone and you will fail miserably.
I hope I don’t need to describe in detail how charities or missions might try to exert pressures/help in such things.
I guess the best way to summarize it would be that civilization has to figure out how to exist and mitigate the damage in a universe where hard drugs also exist. Because acting like they are great, acting like they don’t exist, and acting like they can be made to not exist are all just different sides of the same delusional coin.
Yes I know this sounds wishy-washy and dodging the question. But I mentioned the invisible hand for a reason: if you try to explain how a market works in the real world to a communist apparatchik he will make the same critique for the same reasons. And the universe will continue to merrily work its own way and not care about his critique.
* “rampant and destructive”, just to make sure say, caffeine doesn’t get swept up in the mess. You never know what innocuous statement someone will pick out…
Chuckle Chuckle
Your comment about “caffeine use” reminds me of the “heavy-handed anti-smoking” garbage going around.
People who whine about “The War On Drugs” and Glorify Pot Smoking will more often than not Jump Onto the “Tobacco Smoking Is Evil” Band-wagon.
I smoke Legal Tobacco in my Pipe but will guarantee that in plenty of circles I’d get into “more trouble” smoking legal tobacco than I would smoking Pot.
Normally I’m polite about smoking my pipe but there are times when I think the anti-smoking idiots deserve “Smoke Blown Into Their Face”.
Very true.
Ah. A strawman , complete with giving an excuse to completely ignore the discussion being made and run off chanting unrelated slogans.
Hasn’t worked so great for the left, not sure why you’d want to adopt the tactic, but not my circus.
You say a strawman. I say people I have seen holding exactly that position.
If the idiot college libertarians are justification to dismiss even people who bring well reasoned arguments, then I can dismiss anyone on the other side as an idiot as well. Consistent standards, or none at all; everything else is still none at all but without the honesty.
And that wasn’t a slogan: it is because you have repeatedly proven that if I do not make certain positions crystal clear you will twist my words into whatever it is you feel like on a given day.
As it happens, your strawman is the inverse of when I point to the College Libertarian when the argument is that we are to trust the conclusion on the basis of a philosophical lable.
One is pointing to a much wider variety of activity on the part of a group than is covered by someone arguing for the philosophy; the other is attempting to limit, and punish the entire opposition on the basis of a vaguely described and undefined title.
“No Libertarian would seriously argue-” is mostly useful for identifying that the big-L-libertarian-party is not serious; responding to a detailed discussion of costs and benefits with what is at best a caricature of a third party, and then shouting a counter to something nobody is saying when you get a hint of pushback, is likewise not going to inspire confidence that you are engaging on something besides an emotional level.
And that wasn’t a slogan: it is because you have repeatedly proven that if I do not make certain positions crystal clear you will twist my words into whatever it is you feel like on a given day.
It’s a bastard variation of the Socratic method.
That your intentions don’t match some portion of the assertions, assumptions or answers you make is not my problem, and if you think I’m trying to do something besides figure out what the ever loving crud you are thinking/ coming from/ assuming/ trying to convey/ etc, your trigger for being screwed with is massively low.
It is when you refuse to accept when I say “I misphrased that, let me try again”.
Aaaand it’s hit the cycle where I point out the other aspects that go into the response of ‘no, that still doesn’t work,’ and if it hasn’t hit the wall it will soon.
Peace out.
“Cultural Problem”.
Yep, in a Culture where “if it feels good, do it” seems to rule, even reasonable anti-hard-drug laws will be disobeyed on a major scale.
Those of us who see a very real problem with massive usage of such drugs are fighting the “if it feels good, do it” idea.
Our so-called Betters laughed at the idea of “just say no to drugs” while (very likely) use illegal drugs themselves.
But yes, go ahead and legalize those drugs but I doubt that you would really like the results. 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡 😡
So close, and yet so far…..
Now you’re getting boring.
Legalizing and taxing drugs just leads to bootleg drugs. It’s already a thing for marijuana, to the point that states are very unhappy with the loss of business at legal “dispensaries” and other businesses, and the gangs have been very happy with the addition to their bottom line. And now that a business principle has been established for the gangs, they will do the same thing with any other legalized drug.
Drug gangs have a near total coverage of the market, as well as more franchisees. They have access to suppliers that don’t pay taxes or worry about regulations and regulatory costs. I don’t think any state can undercut them.
Well, Canada sure can’t. The Canadian government is losing millions selling pot. Even in Canadian dollars that’s a lot.
But, can we all agree that Drug Prohibition is not working?
in Denver cops spend most of their time tracking down non-tax paying growers.
I basically warned all of you that the state with their taxed stuff would not be displacing the drug gangs after Legalization. Those of you who legalization advocates were assuming economic outcomes that didn’t follow from your wider assumptions.
And, no, in fact we cannot agree that ‘Drug Prohibition’ was not working.
You fellows are overlooking a few things again.
First being, the stupid oversight of the legal professionals in plausibly appearing to have a profession wide conspiracy. Yeah, I’ve been only talking about how bad a move it is for the professionals. Because I have been trying to reach the sane lawyers, and motivate them to try to fix their sh!t, and do not want to contaminate that with other things.
But, there are in fact wider implications, for a lot of policy areas. One of these, if it is real, how long has it been going on, and how wide is it?
We can speculate that decades of established criminal law has had precedents or outcomes corruptly manipulated.
There was an interesting case recently in Illinois, and surprise surprise the judge in charge is also law faculty at Northwestern, one of the universities which had an interim law dean of interest.
Is it only the one judge who could have possibly been paid off by way of lecturing fees?
More specifically, we can speculate that capital punishment has been improperly restricted, or that in some districts, that they have deliberately released people to keep the gangs functioning. From the bullshit of the past couple years, we have basically confirmed my assertion that they think of criminals as being fighting power of value compared to regular Americans. See the Rittenhouse saltiness.
We know outright about the refusal to enforce the laws against theft.
If this speculation is correct, then they could have generated a surplus of criminals. Potentially, this surplus could be eliminated with vigilantism.
So. H-LL No. You will not be getting a concession that ‘Drug Prohibition’ was not working. Until 1. It is clear that we have the same level of loose criminals from a formal legal system that is unambiguously lawful. 2. You guys are clearly no longer working on assumptions fiddled with by the propagandists and tyrants responsible for our current mess, and potentially involved with the crooked ‘legalizations’ that have occurred so far.
There have been profound breeches of trust, things are deeply broken, and nothing makes sense. If I changed my mind in these circumstances to go along with you all, I would probably already be hard left, dead, or both.
It is not at all clear to my why you guys are picking now, of all times, to push on this stuff.
It makes about as much sense as debating the policy of keeping engineering boards of licensure at the state level, or consolidating at the federal level.
More specifically, we can speculate that capital punishment has been improperly restricted, or that in some districts, that they have deliberately released people to keep the gangs functioning. From the bullshit of the past couple years, we have basically confirmed my assertion that they think of criminals as being fighting power of value compared to regular Americans. See the Rittenhouse saltiness.
I’m firmly convinced that part of why they got so publicly stupid about Trump is the noises– with useful motions– he was making to recognizing the Cartels as terror organizations.
That opens a lot of financial examination doors.
And I suspect that both let-them-walk Dems, and a lot of BLM type activists, would turn out to be funded by the Cartels. (I am aware that black/hispanic violence is a significant portion of “hate crimes;” that doesn’t mean they don’t both want the cops to be distrusted and shackled so they can BE the law.)
Legal outlets also make it so you have a place to launder your supply.
Son of a family friend was going to get rich off pot… thank God, he had the brains to figure out that no, he was not going to win when the cartel guys showed up and informed him he was going to have an incredibly bountiful crop of very low grade pot. Helped that he still doesn’t have kids or a steady girlfriend, and his only surviving parent was law enforcement, so walking away only cost money.
Yeah, the cartels are the big element of why we aren’t going to have a sudden outbreak of consensus, even though non-riot supporting law enforcement, and non-Soros prosecutors are also very very suspicious.
In the ’90s, the supreme court decided, basically arbitrarily and capriciously, that we would no longer be executing minors. Cartels started using young girls as hitmen, which isn’t cool the way anime says, it is horrible.
Some people in America are not in the same region as the Mexican border. Some people in America do not follow criminal activity like it is a sport. The intersection is not really aware of the degree to which the cartels are at war with us, and why we cannot really set up a stable peace consensus with them.
Yeah, people trot out the economic arguments for legalization defunding the cartels. If they seriously cared about that, except as a ruse, they would either change their minds if the evidence of such failed to materialize, or if an improved mental experiment showed that they had screwed up their earlier mental experiments. So, there is no basis for a consensus between the Americans who do have a strong sense of the cartels as enemy, and the Americans who do not.
Large, varied country, where at the best of times people did not like or trust each other as much as they thought.
If the drug warrior law enforcement is also an enemy, then you have more enemies, you don’t make some of your enemies into real friends or allies. And, if the situation really is one of being surrounded by enemies, looking for effective targets can lead one in strange directions.
In the ’90s, the supreme court decided, basically arbitrarily and capriciously, that we would no longer be executing minors. Cartels started using young girls as hitmen, which isn’t cool the way anime says, it is horrible.
Borderland Beat translates news stories. Some are from cartel members/supporters.
Both are still directly horrifying in their content, because you look through this and know someone translated this because they think it makes their guys look good.
It’s particularly bad when there are no jobs and nothing for the youth to do.
What cigarette smuggling shows is that if the tax on something is multiples of the actual cost of the item, people will seek ways to avoid the tax, and/or more those dollars into their profit stram, not the government’s. It does also show is the people who say legalize maryj so we can tax it are nuts.
*nods*
Criminals go where they can get money– in the case of cigs, the tax is “only” 25%-50% of the price, not even a double mark-up. If you steal it, that markup goes higher, but the entire point is that they get what they want. They recruit just fine when they are “only” making profit from objectively horrific means, because there are people who care about money and not about other people.
Leave it to the demonic union of activists and government to come up with a solution that brings the worst of all possible worlds.
New Hampshire has no sales tax, Massachusetts does. There’s a mall in southern New Hampshire so close to the state border that the parking lot is in Massachusetts. The sign over the entrance says Welcome to New Hampshire.
Interesting, I never looked at Captain Kirk like that. But there may be something to that.
I’ve been a lunatic in this way for about 15-25 years.
It is fair to warn people that on this thing, my judgement is not at all sound.
Folks ought to filter their inputs, to fit their own needs. Folks have their own levels of tolerance for tedious versus crazy versus useful.
It is not clear that I could /fix/ this bit of crazy, even if I wanted to. If I could be persuaded to fix it, there is a decent chance that I would have been persuaded, already.
It eased a bit after I managed to make enough changes to my own life that the level of unpleasantness substantially decreased.
I hadn’t thought I’d gotten louder on this aspect, recently.
In hindsight, it makes sense that I might have gotten a lot unhappier, or at least gone way silent on the more pleasant part of my range.
The lockdowns have turned up the crazy in the population.
This. I’m doing my best, but my sympathy for others doing Objectively Stupid Things has dropped to basement levels. Fortunately, I keep that behind my teeth in public.
I haven’t noticed any change in your posts, and I don’t even remember you talking about “druggies.” Which is kind of a sensitive subject with me, as my entire family were dopeheads, and I was crippled by a random dopehead who ran over me with a Buick.
He’s actually way saner than he used to be.
Yeah, I haven’t heard him call for a campaign of extermination in a while, now.
I vaguely recall bringing it up a few times recently in the context of ‘in this way I am insane’/’this is one of my problems’.
It’s just that I’d spent maybe up to a year and a half prior not talking about it at all.
I’m guessing my self-hatred got worse, due to reflecting on some personal events this summer.
But, these days I can’t talk myself into feeling ‘the societal ills are a result of drugs’. There’s human malice here, and while I can’t blame everything on the malicious actors, their meddling means that the “Chesterton’s fence” case for drug schedules, etc., is much weaker than I had formerly thought it.
I still see the bad people as probably thinking that the pot smokers will be foot soldiers for them, but the rest of their assumptions include stuff that is completely crazy, and out of touch with reality. Pot probably does cause psychiatric issues in some cases, and the overlap with criminal behavior probably isn’t good, but it would be stupid to make any decision based on opposition comprehensions.
One of the big questions right now is ‘are we going to have to kill our way out of this’? I don’t know that we /must/.
When a bunch of people are looking at that question, and a bit confused, it is much more risky to advocate for normally fringe positions, such as my proposals for war against Canada, etc. ‘The world has gone insane’, or at least it often looks like the old thinking no longer holds, and one might suddenly find that the old tired argument has persuaded someone who is very stressed. I’ve also mostly shut up about Canada, not because I like or trust the Canadian government, but because of domestic uncertainties taking precedent over a bunch of foreign policy risks. There are some things that might matter, forex, if we are in the middle of a world war with the PRC, and they are waging it with biological weapons.
But, the active drug users are one of the ‘are they committed supporters of the opposition?’ categories. Are they all Michael Browns? That could simply be yet another bit of opposition propaganda, they way they were trying to paint all black men as violent criminals and all whites as racist murderers of blacks.
So, more relevant than ‘Bob on Canada’, /and/ someone new calling me out on it may be pointing out an important insight.
Ah, but is Bob really getting saner, or has the rest of the world just gone so crazy that he looks sane by comparison? 😛
It’s obvious that our Ruling Class has become totally disconnected from reality, wandering in some delusional dimension where anything that spews out of their pie-holes is Truth! and therefore immune to contradiction by mere facts and consequences. And almost half of the sheep still believe them. I see masks everywhere, in stores, on the street, in cars — I saw a kid cross the street on a skateboard, wearing a mask.
George Carlin was right. “Think about how stupid the average person is, and then remember that half of them are even stupider than that.”
No way to tell, and that is with the information about my state of mind that only I have.
Baseline American sanity is either worse, or folks just haven’t prepared themselves to handle the current stress levels.
There probably are elements of stuff that is difficult for me that I have been handling better. But, no clue if I am over all better, worse, or inside of measurement error of before.
I’m a bit more oriented towards wanting to live than I was during the Obama years. That doesn’t mean that I am coping well with regard to my feelings towards some of the RL things that were part of me making progress after the Obama years.
Right now, I’ve spent a bit too much time today not eating or drinking. And, part of that is fixation related to being terrified and unhappy about some of the RL stuff. At least I’ve had breakfast.
So, I could both be crazier, /and/ the world could have gone even crazier.
I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I will ease up on the fear, and estimate my state less negatively if I go have some lunch, drink some more water, and get my next vitamins down.
Last evening was a big difficult for me, /and/ after recovering a little before bed, I decided that the behavior I’ve been seeing online is probably people being a bit keyed up, even by the standards of the last month. And people might be keyed up about something that is real, or about something imaginary.
The world has gone crazier.
Right now, I’ve spent a bit too much time today not eating or drinking. And, part of that is fixation related to being terrified and unhappy about some of the RL stuff. At least I’ve had breakfast.
From my point of view, so YMMV etc., it is right and proper to worry that the Deep State and its various minions and useful idiots are working themselves up to taking all your stuff and leaving you in penury if not dead in a ditch. However, even if that worry points to a correct prediction of future events, it’s not going to happen today, and it’s probably not going to happen next month, or even next year. And when it does happen, it will almost certainly happen to someone else first so you’ll have some warning and some notice that the old rules no longer apply.
Otherwise, life goes on, and you do yourself no favors by paralyzing yourself so much with worry that you fail to take care of yourself, your loved ones, your dwelling, your job, etc. Make worrying a hobby, not a job, and definitely not an obsession.
Or, in the immortal words of Bob Newhart, “Stop it!”
It’s genuinely personal stuff. That is what I meant by real life.
Usual sorts of mental problems.
Not worrying about the wider political situation. Wider political situation is probably going to be fine.
This is stuff that I knew most of the risks going into, and I’m basically resolved if it goes as badly as the inner worries fear. It is just a bad job of managing typical sort of worries that things may go badly. My imagination is not specific, and so not only are the vague worries worse than anything that has ever happened, they are worse than just about anything that could possibly happen.
One of the bits of progress on my own health has been in taking a step back, letting go, and not fretting over things that haven’t gone badly yet.
Or the world is insaner
Deep breaths. I have some of the same impulses towards narcissists. But then, they ARE addicts – their addiction is sadistic glee in causing others pain, shame, and degradation. Ugh.
Not entirely the same thing for me.
Some family experiences contributed to having a deep fear of mental illness. Despite, or in addition to being aware of my own issues.
Thankfully, family experiences that were not narcissism, and were not substance abuse.
I’ve basically forced myself to tolerate naturally occurring mental illness. (Which is not the same as tolerating all behavior motivated by naturally occurring mental illness.)
I’ve not yet made peace with recreational drug use.
Sure, I’m not happy about the consequences of some of the family situation.
I think the issue is really my own self-hatred. I’m chasing an impossible ideal, that of thought and behavior that is never impaired. So, my own addictive behavior, compulsions, and getting upset to the point of paralysis, is a disappointment. When I remember to see things in perspective, the improvements I’ve managed are a bit of a comfort.
Perhaps, now that I have figured it out, finally, it will help to remember that I am disappointed because I cannot match a goal that is insane to chase as I do.
Yeah, deep breathes.
At least you understand that it is impossible……
don’tchewhimoutdon’tchewhimoutdon’tchewhimoutdon’tchewhimoutdon’tchewhimout
This isn’t an ideal chased for other people, this is purely for my self.
Though, my level of emotional commitment is part of why I can’t emotionally understand certain acts as something a human could do.
(Though, after I improved to the point that I was getting paralyzed by stress, I started to understand why people might drown in a bottle to deal with that stuff.)
Anyway, early on, what I noticed myself doing was really stuff I needed to be trying anyway, so the whole effort seemed reasonably sane. And parts of it were even sane.
It has taken a /really/ long time to hit on the awareness of what it was I thought I was trying to do. Because the rule of thumb subsets include things that are outright sane, and the only aspects that I regularly touch on in ways that demonstrate that I am not well here are a) getting extremely angry at people for reasons not worth the degree of anger b) screwing up or temporarily abandoning because of stress all* the little things I struggle to do to keep myself functional.
*Forex, I massively increased my powdered magnesium supplements this spring, because I was getting really depressed, and hadn’t realized that my stress levels were causing me to pass a whole lot more of it. I have a very restricted diets, and am reasonably sure I /need/ most of the supplements, before going into the medical details that are a little bit too personally identifying.
Something to consider when you have stable time: the desire to divorce the mind from all outside influences and render it 100% unimpaired at all times from all reasons is one of the utopian roots which in our day has created some of the crazier elements of wokeism.
I think I had just said that when I have it all laid out in words, I can see that the objective is itself insane.
Beyond that… Dude, when you see a cripple hobbling around town, do you lecture them about the wider societal harm caused by wanting to get around and get business done?
It is a very strong mental habit, ingrained by years and years of trying to do stuff that made sense at the time. It is rooted in or has motivated effective coping choices.
Part of why I am such a tedious bore is trained habit, that helps me get past my language issues enough to say anything. I screw up a lot, because getting past the issues takes enough effort that I’ve not yet learned how to judge what my audience can handle or is interested in.
So, yes, I have a lot I need to learn in terms of better behavior.
No, you do not have a point about the wider societal implications. There are no wider societal implications.
A personal insanity gives me a different perspective on a policy debate. That would go nowhere if I wasn’t making rational arguments for or against this or that policy.
One guy arguing for a soap bridge across the Atlantic gets exactly zero soap bridges seriously attempted.
The most fundamental issue now with successfully making a case for legalization is civil liability. We just had a bunch of politically motivated riots using the excuse of Ben Crump suing a guy for ‘causing’ a death that was, IIRC, plausibly meth dusted with fentanyl. You will not convince the public that you can implement a civil liability shield that can protect against that.
And, do the homework you should have done in the first place, and think about what that might look like. At least, for any substance that screws with judgement about violence and risk.
You would have a civil liability shield, for people dropping dead in the general area. To prevent liability for people ODing in front of your store. You would also have a criminal liability shield, if you shoot in self defense someone who is high as a kite and trying to tear off your face.
Basically, there would have to be some sort of test, and if a corpse has drugs of the type, then a lot of options for legal action go away. And, such a policy has a problem that would actually be quite a bit worse than the status quo. It would amount to a license to murder, so long as you could reliably get to the samples. Or were murdering those who were high. The people with the most frequent desire to murder people who are high, are drug traffickers killing other drug traffickers. And, if current police powers are wrongly used by drug warriors, then you should not give police freer access to a tool that could shield them from scrutiny.
In conclusion to this point, in practice, liability shields that would suffice for the current legal environment would be essentially the same as outlawing all drug users, and authorizing those not outlawed to kill them.
So, situation is deeply broken. You are not going to fix it by applying a theoretically simple model. I am not going to fix it by applying a theoretically simple model. Things are broken is so many ways that movement to better policy will only happen after changes are made that do not fit theory and can not be predicted in advance. Once something changes, once we have theoretical explanations of that change, then maybe we can have meaningful theoretical policy debates again. Until then, theoretical policy arguments on issues that aren’t the core of the current crisis are going to have very little traction for consensus based policy change.
“end the drug war with surrender” and “end the drug war by making the rubble bounce” are both not core to this crisis. They look a little this way, because druggies and anti-fa/BLM foot soldiers, but drugs are not the core issue. Anti-Fa and BLM may even be weak enough that criminals aren’t even a major issue. Electoral fraud is one of the core issues, definitely. Yes, congress screwing around for decades, and the federal leos having too much power are also core issues.
You may think that they lead to the question of the drug war, but they lead to enough other things that the drug war is not a core issue with an unambiguous answer.
Actual answers will probably be local, and not neatly fit into the categories of all your way, or all my way. And they will not be implemented according to the theoretical model of a single nutjob, such as my self.
So, as long as I am not lying about the downsides of my theoretical claims, as long as I am not carrying out a propaganda campaign, there are zero societal implications to me mouthing off about my crazy ideas. And I haven’t the money, the time nor the ability to mount an effective propaganda campaign on this. I’m sure I haven’t even persuaded Foxfier and Paul; I’m pretty sure that they’ve independently decided that some of the Criminal Justice Reform arguments stink.
PS As for your ‘path to dealing with the drug problem with cultural change instead of the drug war’, and assertion that the drug warriors should be killed according to the arguments of the drug warriors? Improvements in the modern chemical supply industry have been continually preventing the arguments about parallel historical situations from being really valid since around the 19th century, at least. So, to some extent we are looking at new situations, and we especially don’t have reliable means of societally engineering answers to those situation. One model of what ‘cultural change’ would look like is ‘people do not want to be around people with certain ideas about substance abuse’. One model for such a change occurring is a tyrannical majority capriciously punishing people who think that way, so that the go alongs to get alongs decide to pretend that they never thought such ideas were sound. As a somewhat Christian nation that somewhat fears tyranny, we have not really licensed tyrants to torture people with such thinking to death. In particular, nobody has a free hand to torture to death the subset of such thinkers who are actively using drugs. So, this amounts to a treating Muslims nicely/surrender versus nuanced cosmopolitanism/nation building versus nuke ’em/they will only behave peaceably to strength type of debate, and you aren’t in much better contact with reality than I am.
There is no good theoretical answer to the how of the cultural change. So, you working to change culture your way and me working to change culture my way are both things that should be done regardless of what the actual current best fit of theory to reality is. But, until such cultural changes occur, the people unpersuaded by the theoretical arguments are not likely to change their minds. Even theoretical arguments about how a cultural changes will occur in the future.
My interest in the drug war is mostly as a side show of “could y’all *please* stop pissing in the soup” crossed with the side effects on the things I do care about. And I do mean “y’all”: AFAICT the mass of both sides of the
debatescreaming match are mostly competing on who can play the game dirtier and with the worst arguments. Strange. It is almost like the mass of any culture-scale debate are either too stupid to get dressed in the morning or too disingenuous to trust they will argue fairly.No. But if I see he has a crutch which has a split in it which might finish splitting and impale him I might point out the problem so he can get a different crutch or apply duct tape to the current one. I was trying to point out an aspect of the problem you may have missed; others have pointed out flaws in my logic, and while I have frequently failed, I have attempted to not attack them for it no matter how much changing the flaw may hurt.
Also you have your issues, other people have theirs. “Be perfect Vulkans except they didn’t go nearly far enough” is a peeve of mine, hence the “don’t chew him out” self-comment.
Exactly.
And “oh we will just make it illegal and that will just work somehow” is the simplest of simple models.
We often talk about the hypocrisy of the left. Then alternate between talking about how impossible it is to effectively ban guns and talking about how if we just ban drugs a little better it will totally work this time. (see: areas where it effects things I care about)
Umm… yea– I have a few horrible experiences with narcissists– and can’t tolerate them either.
The level of incompetence is stunning, too. Two members of the View just removed from the set after being told their Covid tests were positive….while sitting unmasked on the stage.
OTOH, given what the other guys are trying to do, incompetence is a blessing.
Hmm, this is interesting contrast to “A sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”. Somewhere on the incompetence spectrum, if it’s seriously advanced, it mitigates the malice.
Sounds like a Laffer curve situation.
It’s in tension with “oft evil will shall evil mar”.
❤
Yes, and then the other hosts moved over to where they were sitting to balance the table.
Either they don’t believe anything they’ve been shoveling for the past year and a half, or they are morons to stupid to breath without handlers telling them which way. Or both. Embrace the healing power of ‘and’ and all that…
My belief is that what they believe is unknowable.
I think they and all other like them are being told what to say and do.
The View was pure theater, planned in advance, to add drama to the slag’s visit, IMO.
Consider how much effort is taken in keeping her *out* of interview situations…
I’m after trying to parse that and I can’t. So either I’m not drunk enough, or … Is it Dead City of R’Lyeh unknowable, or My ways are not your ways unknowable?
Just watched that video. Behar says “oh, it was probably a breakthrough case. They’ll be fine.” and then dismissed the whole issue to move on along to Kamalamadingdong. So, I’d say Behar is not nearly as worried about WuFlu as she lets on.
In the 70’s I remember browsing an article on the Peter Principle. as a 13 year old I didn’t get it. Later as an adult I found the actual book and browsed it and realized that it had something. Everyone rises until they hit their level of incompetence. It just seems for our SJW types that level is somewhere between toilet trained and playing pat-a-cake (and I wonder if the FICUS doesn’t need Depends…). And as our hostess has noted the Press (pfui!!!) seems unwilling to call them on it.
Just had a friend ask me today if I thought Biden was in control, my response was that I didn’t think he was in control of his bladder, never mind anything else.
The way they’re flailing about indicates that who’s in charge is a committee…
“…a creature with six or more legs, and no brain.” — RAH
Not sure if it is a committee or if it is 2 (or likely more) factions gaining control of things for a brief moment and sending things off helter skelter in a new direction. The results would essentially be indistinguishable. There is some serious infighting inside the “democrat” party.
It comes down to the parties that thought it was a good idea to back this.
If they wanted a coherent, effective leader, they would have cheated one in instead.
To varying extents, the campaign and the transition team would have been staffed with compromises, and supporters of the various backers.
Transition team appointed Initial staff who were vicious morons, and they’ve been jockeying ever since.
If you take the organization chart of a functioning organization, and staff the positions blindly from vicious morons, you naturally get a lot of squabbling over ideas. You will have a bunch of overconfident ‘genius’ master plans. i.e., a random word salad generator. That population of word salads gets sampled by the gatekeepers passing it up, into chunks of word salad available to decision makers.
A Joe Biden ‘decision maker’ might randomly select word salad chunks, effectively be in charge, and give the same visible results as a committee or feuding factions.
Edith apparently is not a high functioning Renaissance Man. If she is managing Joe’s inputs or ‘decisions’, and doesn’t have control over her own staff support, she isn’t getting better than random chunks of word salad, and maybe isn’t any more competent at understanding what the word salad means than Joe.
I think backers like Obama might be able to talk to Joe, and get him to select a proposal assembled by that backer’s people in the organization. In which case, it would reduce to factionalism.
A consistent circle of gate keepers would reduce to a committee.
It’s half a dozen ventriloquists squabbling over one dummy. Or, back-seat drivers grabbing the wheel, stomping on the gas and grinding the gears while Biden plays with the little plastic steering wheel on his child seat.
Youtube just promoted a video purporting to be Biden getting an injection. If true, decent chance he will be dead pretty soon.
More strokes from those shots will not do him any good.
Heard he dropped a deuce on the White House carpet picked it up and put it in his suit coat pocket
Think they should have left them on the set; and monitored the rest of the cast and crew. Nobody can seem to tell us if asymptomatic covid positive people can transmit the disease, or how infectious they are if they even can.
Nobody can seem to tell us if asymptomatic covid positive people can transmit the disease, or how infectious they are if they even can.
2 + 2 = 4, 3, or 5 depending on the needs of the Party at any particular moment, Winston.
https://memegenerator.net/instance/59289965/picard-lights-there-are-four-lights
They are vaccinated. Therefore they will not transmit it. Instead, it was the fault of some unvaccinated, asymptotic, and indeed unidentified person.
Proving “Follow the Science” is just empty-headed buzzwords, not rational decisions.
It’s magical thinking, too. Just follow the ritual and you will receive the blessing. Deviate from the ritual and ill will befall you. The fact the ritual is constantly changing is ignored in favor of blaming the people who refuse to follow it.
Add in the, “I live in the Northeast/west coast. I am educated, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, secular and free of primitive superstition because I believe in Science. I am following the ritual perfectly, therefore I should be healthy and blessed….but I am miserable and afraid. Yet the ignorant, superstitious bumpkins (especially the ones my virtuous ancestors conquered) are healthier and happy. This is intolerable! They must be punished!” attitude I see in social media and I worry. A bunch.
You and me both. I’ve been worried since before the statues started coming down. Look up the 8 steps to genocide. Seriously.
http://genocidewatch.net/2013/03/14/the-8-stages-of-genocide/
slightly different steps:
genocidewatch DOT net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/
The West appears to be dabbling in Stage 5. South Africa is well into Stage 6 and tilting toward Stage 7.
Yep, these. Looked them up for Avatar the Last Airbender to try and give backstory to “how could a whole people get wiped out that way?”
Did not want to see them in the U.S. Not at all.
Haiti 1804, coming to a neighborhood near you.
…Oh that’s just a case of the cold chills, right there.
That’s it!!! You’ve tagged it Dorthy. They’re the Materialist/Scientist equivalent of the Health and Wealth gospel heresy!!! They’re already effectively Cargo Cult Scientist not being willing to learn that icky math and science which are so old white man designed and driven with its tendencies to claim actual truths. So its not hard to add additional shamanic behaviors to get the blessings of whatever it is they believe in. Because bad things don’t happen to “good” people and they went to the right schools, stick the right yard signs in their yard say the right things and believe the right things. Unfortunately deprogramming Health and Wealth types is well nigh impossible because they don’t understand/believe in reproduceability/falsification of hypotheses. Hell their chosen One for 2016 was beaten by a man they find common and lowly and downright evil. Instead of saying “you know maybe we had a crap candidate” they doubled down and found an even crappier one. Sadly the Democrat equivalent of Therns from Barsoom made sure that Crap Sandwich 2 was “victorious” so they could continue to be the power behind the throne. I’m wondering if FICUS has somehow escaped the constraints the Thern like ones placed upon him. Or maybe the Therns aren’t as capable as they’re cracked up to be.
And when they repeated the tests the next day, the showed negative. Nothing like a “false positive” to give an excuse not to have a “live interview”.
Now imagine the wailing and pearl-clutching and finger-pointing if those had been ‘conservative’ guests with positive test results. “Eeevul White Supremacists they deserve to die!!” Even if they had been ‘fully inoculated’.
That explains the crazies-in-power and the evils-in-power rather effectively.
Just don’t forget that we’ve got a lot of the folks they mugged on the way up– like Trump, for example.
I think the mental image of the dog chasing the tire– the mean girl who is now TRULY at the top of the pile in all social signals oh wait what do you mean THERE IS WORK WITH THIS? And I can’t just bully folks into making it happen?– is likewise very useful.
Changing slightly to dogs chasing cats– I’ve seen three outcomes.
One, they chase the cat a token amount.
Two, they chase the cat until the catch and kill it.
Three, they chase the cat until a cat turns around and eats their face.
Case one is the only one that has dogs that chase cats as a constant.
Case two, it doesn’t take long until they are prevented from chasing cats. Sometimes via prevention from ever doing anything at all, ever again, sometimes at the hand of the cat they caught. Generally choose their targets rather more carefully than you’d think.
Case three, if they survive, they either stop chasing cats, or turn into a very token form of case one– bark bark rush ha he ran not chase, with a chance of becoming one of the more obviously predatory cat-killers.
This is a late generation case one dog that did the stupid dog competitions and is about to catch the cat, which isn’t a declawed kitten….
My grandfather swore his cat — a fearless tom — practiced dashing across the street juuuuuust in front of passing cars until he got it down. The next time a dog chased him through the neighborhood…. Bam! Cat strolled back up on the stoop with a smug expression, according to Grandaddy….
my childhood cat ate dogs for breakfast
We had a huge yellow male, 18#s and trim, just long legged, body, and tail. He’d sleep in the planter by the front door. We couldn’t figure out why the paper delivery person’s dog, a golden retriever, would wait at the street rather than accompany his young charge to the porch to deliver the paper. Until the neighbor told us of witnessing Yeller chase the dog down the street one morning. Yeller wasn’t nearly as big as that dog. I mean it makes sense. Our cats back then, thought our German Shepard was mom, and the inlaws malamutes were Aunt and Uncle.
I love that!
Some foxes took up residence in our neighborhood here on the rural edge of town, and the neighbors are worried because at least 3 cats have gone missing since then. We’ve got 3 cats, so we’re worried too. But there’s cats and then there’s cats… Our youngest one is a 3-year-old boy that’s 12 pounds of concentrated muscle and mischief, and twice now we’ve randomly interrupted him in the process of chasing a fox out of our (rather wild) backyard. I wonder how many of those episodes we *haven’t* seen.
I’ve had two Boy cats that would take my black lab to their cat fights. Those were all won quickly. 🐱
My oldest cat wants a puppy, to replace the dogs from her kittenhood, in her opinion the younger cats are not sufficiently reverent of her, and so she wants a dog. 😉
I’ve had two Boy cats that would take my black lab to their cat fights. Those were all won quickly. 🐱
My oldest cat wants a puppy, to replace the dogs from her kittenhood, in her opinion the younger cats are not sufficiently reverent of her, and so she wants a dog. 😉
That’s a new one on me. When I was a kid we had semi feral (aka Barn, though no barn involved) cats. They enjoyed lying on the tar road in the fall and spring and soaking up the heat. Our road was VERY quiet so this was mostly not an issue, and when a car turned in at the bottom of the hill maybe 300′ away
they quickly left the road. That is with one exception. We had a neighbor who I will call Mr. Smith (to protect the innocent and avoid speaking ill of the deceased). He had an ancient Corvair that was massively out of tune. It chugged like a diesel and blew clouds black smoke out the tail pipe and achieved a top speed of perhaps 5 mph coming up the hill. Mr. Smith was at least 75, possibly 80+. He looked a bit like Mr. Magoo and hated cats with a passion. He’d turn into the road and the cats would look down the hill but seemed to recognize his car. He’d charge up the hill at a rate of speed that MIGHT endanger a wounded sloth if it was inattentive. The cats would lie there until the last possible moment ultimately darting into the field and woods across the street from my house. Mr. Smith would turn towards them but it was utterly hopeless, the cats could (and did) dodge him easily. They then would come and sit on the porch and groom and look smug. Cats really are jerks at the core.
Depends on the cat.
Archie was an orange creampuff. He really just wanted to sit on shoulders and lick lightbulbs. I imagine the fact that he was originally a feral cat who ended up in the same house as a hyper kinetic Texas Heeler (Dixie, aka Crazy-Lady).
Oscar I only had for a while. He was a complicated cat. We think he was a house cat who ended up abandoned, and didn’t trust people after that. What we didn’t realize was he had likely picked up a case of feline corona virus while he was in the pound, that had morphed into an adult case of feline infectious peridonitis, so the entire time I had him, he was getting progressively more and more ill. But, by the end, I think he’d realized he could trust people again.
Sam is now a middle aged fellow, who mostly wants companionship. Unfortunately we still haven’t been able to teach our little one to slow down and let him approach her. Hopefully we can get through to her, because I think they would both enjoy it immensely. Everything going to remote work does mean that he can sack out by my keyboard during the afternoons though.
Our son’s dog is a type one -chase the cat until he corners it, then barks in its face until the cat gets tired of it and leaves. The cats look bored and irritated.
He’s 8 or 9 now, and a very portly puppy (looks more like Churchill every day) so I suspect his cat chasing days are over.
Barry the unready is a malignant narcissist, Ficus is a malignant narcissist with dementia. Camel is just stupid. The rest of them are Harry Frankfurt’s Bullsh-ters made manifest. They will say whatever is necessary to get past the next news cycle. It’s all they know and it’s the story of their lives. If they weren’t so dangerous I’d pity them. As it is I despise them.
They are totally vulnerable to the attack of the (leftist) Twitter mob. If there’s a spine among ’em I haven’t seen it yet.
Then we would have had student loan forgiveness.
You’d think so. A single-issue spine?
Forgiveness would mean the gov’t didn’t get its money, and that they didn’t have a sword to hang over their heads. Plus it’s really all dirty Capitalism’s fault anyways.
Nevertheless, it requires spine.
Now I’m wondering what sort of Official brain-lock could be induced by inciting the twitter mob… cuz the best we can hope for is that Ficus-and-crew get nothing done.
We adopted a cat that had been declawed (would not do it myself to a cat, causes all sorts of damage). A declawed cat seems to go right from “it’s fine” to “Tear your throat our with my teeth” without the intervening swat or vocal warnings. Made him unsuitable for our multi cat environment or our then small daughters who were a bit afraid of him. Ended up living his life out as a beloved only cat with my Sister in law…
c4c
I try, I really do, to be an in the end we win optimist.
However I often have to fall back on we humans had a darn good run, next it’s the cockroaches turn & I wish them well, for at least minimal comfort.
Last one out, turn off the lights.
I caught a trout yesterday that was so small it had me doubting my ability to live as an adult human. How am I going to be an outdoorsman if I can’t even catch a decent fish?
We have to survive as a Republic long enough for me to become Fish Master. I have to stay optimistic about my own future. I think it’s those selfish desires that keep me legitimately optimistic.
Carpe carp.
Too small? Never. Lop off the head, gut it, toss it in the pan and fry it up like a smelt.
If you are in a situation where fish and game laws don’t apply, yes.
Fish the deep holes and the eddies under the bridges. That’s where the big fish lie in wait. They get big because most folks don’t think to fish there.
There is, perhaps, a metaphor in that.
We have to survive as a Republic long enough for me to become Fish Master
I find that oddly optimistic and encouraging. However, I’m not sure if I should wish you luck or not…
you’re dramatizing a VERY minor scrape for mankind. JUST FYI
Yeah……. this is *nothing* compared to just the stuff in recorded history.
If fact if one wished to be rude, it would be easy to make the suggestion that the “WURST TIME EVAR” bs is just another version of spoiled whining, from a different angle.
Because everyone before us lived in an era where one man could take out a city’s water supply in an afternoon…..
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2021/09/26/terrorist-much-the-new-yorker-on-blast-for-sharing-piece-from-climate-change-lunatic-calling-for-literal-destruction-of-property/
“Nothing to see here.
Just The New Yorker featuring a piece from a guy talking about blowing up pipelines to help promote the climate change fight.”
It’s not what someone wants that’s any different from the evil that came before…. it’s that someone has the capability to actually DO it with enough motivation.
So…… because someone could destroy things and take us back to $BAD_TIME, we are therefore worse then $BAD_TIME?
If you carefully exclude every way in which one time is better than another, count every way you can twist it to be worse, and then count every way one time could become like another….. yeah, that will produce a result of “things are awful”. I can similarly prove that communism is clearly superior to capitalism.
It will also get you mocked by the adults in the room for winning the over the top edgy teenager competition.
Then ignore the differences and die because you misread the urgency. Ultimately, no one saves anyone who decides not to be.
In what way would claiming this makes it the worst of times help stop such people?
The environmentals used to do that kind of thing all the time.
Spike trees so that the loggers would get maimed when their saws hit the spikes.
Plant explosives near laboratories that might use animals for testing.
Things like that.
I don’t know whether they ever stopped, or whether the news just stopped covering their terrorism and sabotage.
Either way, they’re just going back to their original playbook.
Never completely stopped, but some of them got lazy and started doing stuff in cities where it screwed up their donors. Some moved on to harassing trains and stuff– a couple just went to jail because their vandalism was protesting in support of AntiFa or BLM or something similar, but again it hit in the city so it pissed the wrong folks off.
Taking out a radio in town, flooding the medical building because you heard a rumor they use animals in testing, that gets you in jail and loses funding.
Have heard of a couple of scientists that shot at guys trying to burn their lab down, too….
They now do it in fancy costumes and call themselves Extinction Rebellion et al.
(Earth!First and the other monkywrenchers are still out there, but not as active. The next generation wasn’t so enthused about spending time in Club Fed if they got caught. And when the cartels started moving into the National Forests, wellllll, that cooled the passions of the tree-huggers for hanging out in trees to stop loggers. Plus CA granted the “no logging” request, with the results we’ve seen for the past three years and more.)
wtf I love the cartels now……
/s
History has been a lot worse than this.
Even if the country collapses and the cause of freedom is lost, it’ll be no worse than many falls in the past, and still better than many others.
That’s true, but at the same time, I’d rather not go through a mass famine, even if it’s not up to the Holodomer.
The weird thing is, even though I know it would probably take half a dozen bombs to cut off any major city, I still can’t quite picture it being a real thing. The last starving time in the US was probably the 1930’s and everyone I knew who was alive then is dead now.
It’s funny. That was mostly because our top soil blew off, mostly because of what we didn’t know about agriculture. But if it happens again, it will be instead because our gov’t has simply gone insane.
Even the ’30s wasn’t that bad. Yeah, sometimes it was hard to get food. But you could pick up and move somewhere that had food. It’s not as if the entire country was out of food. Plus, a lot of the problems with food were the result of Roosevelt attempting to “fix” the economy.
No. It was mostly because FDR
I was of the impression that set things off, and only after that did the gov’t step in to “help” everybody?
The main thing I was thinking about was the depression started from a real issue that the gov’t only after went to town with a screw hammer on. Here it looks like our gov’t is just going to stupid is to death.
That said, the way covid has been blasted all out of proportion does makee wonder if the dust bowl was similarly much smaller than advertised as well? This administration does seem to be trying to be the farce rerun of FDR, so who know?
Nope. FDR just poked into everything, whether needed or not. He was a progressive ideologue.
Please read Amity Schlae’s Forgotten Man.
You can read some of the worse New Deal ideas in the mid-late 1920s in the USDA Year books. The Resettlement Agency is one that appears as “this would be a great idea” in, um, the 1926 Yearbook, I think.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had vast areas of arable land, capable of producing far more food than they could consume, and probably more than they could export. Yet through the efficiency of the 5-Year Plans and socialist agricultural policies, they had several waves of internal starvation and had to import food when they could afford it, and accept charity when they couldn’t. Even during the height of the Cold War they were dependent on American food, raised by a tiny number of people on a fraction of the arable land they had.
The nomenklatura, of course, weren’t short of veal and caviar, and they were more concerned about exporting Communism and grand staus projects than basic agriculture and infrastructure.
I wonder, did they get their veal and caviar from State farms, or were those imported from the US too?
In 1981 when I visited the USSR (Russia) they had Hard Currency stores that only accepted Dollars and European currencies. They were PACKED with products, high end food, clothing, etc..
I went into normal stores, they were bare with very few things. In the Gum Department store (a mall really) in Moscow the butcher shop only had some sausage with very long lines. There were some Red Boots being sold on the second floor. People waited in line, paid, then were handed a pair in the box. They would then stand around holding the box with both arms wrapped around it, trying to trade for the right size.
Think of what Americans would do if they saw stores that wouldn’t accept Dollars and had everything and normal stores that accepted Dollars that had almost nothing?
The saying that when Russians saw a line that they first got in the line, THEN asked what the line was FOR.
Was real.
One last thing, Russian WWII Memorials and graveyards. Leningrad, May 1981 the mass graves and Memorial. Russian dirges lots of subtonics played through out. Low background not high volume. Snow falling BIG flakes. Large mounds of mass graves, row after row. Hard to take.
My liberal neighbors, who vote Democrat and own no guns and marched with the pink pussy hat brigade after Trump won, chatted over the fence with us last night. (They really are dears, silly things whose heads have been stuffed full of nonsense.) “We heard there’s going to be food shortages by Thanksgiving,” they said to us, looking worried. “And maybe do our Christmas shopping now? Is that right?”
I wanted to hoist my gun in the air and in my best John Maclean voice, shout: “Welcome to the party, pal!”
Empty stomachs focus the mind. I think Heinlein said something about that once, too. Let’s see how happy the currently sheepish masses are when their stores are bare.
They are blessed to have you across the fence.
Let us know when they turn MAGA. It’ll be fun.
A little surprised they’re taking the idea seriously. Wonder who their source was.
Heh. If they were wiser, and more observant, they could tell that just looking at the shelves *now.*
Today I was treated to the interesting sight of cans of soup, of two varieties (harvest vegetable and lentil somethingie) taking up 16 cans worth of shelf face, 2-4 deep… across two shelves. (Yes, cans that normally take 2-4 slots wide on the shelf were filling 32 slots on the shelf) It was an inspiring attempt on some stocker’s part to make a large chunk of a pallet of seasonally-available soup hide some seriously barren shelves.
Kroger has been doing that off and on since Covidiocy started. To some extent, spot shortages were occurring earlier due to some awful weather in the growing areas. It got worse in 2020, though the worst of the dried bean shortages cleared up with the 2021 season.
The restaurant supply place is not doing well for seafood. A few weeks ago, they had a great selection…
of shrimp. Breaded, jumbo, mini. OTOH, if it had fins, not in stock.
Last week, they had small quantities of other fish, but still a good stock of shrimp.
I’m not supposed to eat shrimp because of gout issues. Sigh.
You should have, in your best “bless your heart” voice, said, “Oh no, dears, that’s just a conspiracy theory.”
But I’m not a nice being.
Civilization has crashed before. The worst is likely around 1100 BC, when all the empires around the Mediterranean and beyond all crashed. They blamed the “sea people”, but it may have been their version of just in time.
If you are Rome, dependent on Egyptian food, what do you do when the ships stop coming?
“For want of a nail, a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, a horse was lost…”until the empire falls.
But remember this crash of civilizations provides the opening for Israel. Saul, David and Solomon are all just after this crash. Part of God’s plan? Crashes? Bad stuff?
As I understand it, they were pure command economies with basically no flexibility, and didn’t have solid agriculture down, so their yields declined year over year. Eventually something up north caused famine in that region pushing people southward, around the time things were coming apart there, and everything when pop, and everyone started looting and eating anything that wasn’t nailed down.
Actually been sketching out a DnD campaign setting loosely inspired by all that interconnection and systematic fragility. I figure the interconnetions they had allow adventures to do their adventuring in a way that makes sense, and the impending complete breakdown of society both provide an interesting backdrop for the adventures and allow the players to fail and/or break things without upending all my world building. It’s all going to go pop anyways 🙂
Problem, as always, is time. Never enough time to do everything, or even most things, I want to do
It is far better to have too much to do, than not enough. The hardest jobs are the one where you have nothing to do. Try “looking busy”, when there is nothing to do. Remember the soviet joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Coming to America soon?
As a former Federal employee I endorse this message. I begged my bosses for things to do…and when I left, they divided my work among three people. (It was a feast/famine job; nothing much to do for months, then multiple manuals would drop, all needing review in about two weeks).
That’s why I can write. Too many makework jobs, and if I’m scribbling longhand, I am OBVIOUSLY working, right?
I’ve read that you have to create a million bad words before you can get to the good ones. Most of my million were written at the receptionists’ desks of the many, many companies where I temped. 🙂
I have for several years been mulling over an RPG campaign set in a non-Earth fantasy Bronze Age. (Probably using FATE as the system. Or GURPS. Which are almost opposite to each other, but there you are.)
I fantasize that, after adventuring for many many sessions, and finding themselves at the head of a fleet sailing to sack a rich city, the players will stop and say, “Hey, waitaminute! We’re the Sea Peoples!”
Nah, Bronze Age with irrigation and fertilizer was fine.
Bad stuff happened, mostly things like tsunamis and weather, and that caused war and destruction.
The mysterious Bronze Age Collapse was coincident with the end of a warm period and the fall into a little ice age… by now we should know how that turns out…
I’m reminded of the long, slow, collapse of the Roman empire. The climate getting colder up north, pushing the forebears of the Vikings south in search of food. And the Huns starting their move east, pushing the Germanic tribes in front of them.
Except the picture was WAY more complex than that and– never mind.
The proximate cause of the fall of the western Roman Empire was their inability in 500 years to come up with a legitimate non-violent succession mechanism. So weakness shown by an emperor triggered a civil war inflicting mass casualties on the very armies that were expected to guard the borders (and pulled them away from the borders for years at a time). The rest of it — Huns and Germans and Picts oh my! — was just opportunistic infection on a compromised state.
Also, honestly, they’d been coming in for centuries. Unchecked. So, yeah.
Huh. Were there papyri declaiming the use of whips on those poor German refugees?
I think the massive inflation caused by the steady devaluation of the currency over the course of 150 years along with the huge tax burden needed to pay for a bloated out of control army and bureaucracy was part of it. Granted, the cost of the army and the continual shifting of emperors were two sides of the same phenomena, but debauching the currency was the main thing,
Finding a pre Antonine coin in an archeological dig is not common. They find literal barrels of coins from the later empire.
US dollar anyone?
Today’s US dollar is worth about 7 cents. The Euro started out at about $1.60; today it’s just over $1.17 so Europe’s inflation is even worse than ours.
Like I always say:
Governments can only print money; they can’t make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.
In 301 AD a pound of gold was priced at 50,000 Denarii, In 311 it was 120,000 D and in 323 300,000 D.. In 337 AD, the year Constantine died, it was 20,000,000 D. The only people paid in gold were the barbarian troops, who being barbarians only accepted gold. Interestingly enough, the purchasing power of gold seems to have remained stable over the entire period.
The cause. Endless war, mostly civil in the Roman’s case. The donative had to be paid.
Perspective. The denarius had been 25 to the ounce at the fall of the republic. Again, best estimates are that the purchasing power of gold did not change and silver didn’t change very much over the 300 years between the founding of the empire and the final abandonment by Diocletian.
if you believe the CPI, I don’t, the US dollar has lost 554% of it’s value since tricky Dick ended convertibility to,gold. A 2021 dollar is worth $6.5 1972 dollars. of course this is BS since the CPI is managed. A better indicator would be an ounce of gold, which cost between $35 and $40 in 1972 and cost $1,755.15 or a 4440% loss in the dollars value.
And that currency got devalued because much of the genuine silver coinage went down the Silk Road to China to buy ephemeral and luxury goods, and never came back. (This should sound familiar.) Meanwhile a labor shortage shut down the Spanish silver mines. Pretty soon there wasn’t enough silver left in the Empire to mint sound coinage. Got so debased that Roman coin was no longer accepted as money, yet there was still the vast Roman army that wanted to get paid (and had formerly sucked up 25% of the tariff revenues that made the Empire rich) and ended up turning to pillage instead.
So, yeah…
It’s been the Chinese practice for thousands of years to drain other cultures of hard cash for ephemerals.
This one’s eye-opening for how consistent some things have been for millennia!
China historically had a thing for silver. 11 ounces of silver would buy an ounce of gold in Europe but two ounces of gold in Canton. There was a thriving arbitrage trade over a long period of time. Then of course, they discovered that China would pay silver for opium, which could be grown in India for, essentially, nothing, This is the skeleton in an awful lot of closets, mine included since I had ancestors in the China trade. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family money came through his Delano grandfather and old horse face John Forbes Kerry, before he married the Heinz widow, owes his family money to his Forbes ancestors, all in the opium trade.
*Grimace* People who want to make money… well, most of them have morals. It only takes a few who don’t to do a lot of damage. See Hollywood and the Olympic gymnasts messes.
The book 1493 shows that the majority of South American silver went to China via Manila; it was what was left over that paid for all of Spain’s European wars.
Partly this was because China all the highest-quality manufactured goods in the world (as had been true for about two thousand years at that point), and partly because they had their own chronic problems with currency manipulation and debasement that they needed large amounts of silver to solve. Until they screwed it up the next time.
Opium was the first time that the silver trade went the other way, because Qing (Manchu) China immiserated a whole lot of Han, and they were easily addicted to a substance that only grew in bulk outside of China.
I am firmly of the belief that if China’s “Century of Humiliation” is ever reified inside China as the “Century of Getting A Clue”, most of our problems with them, to the extent that they’re driven by Han supremacy and contempt for everyone not-China, will go away.
I’m afraid the notion of Han superiority goes back too far for that, along with Han periodically closing off from foreigners, Han destroying the land, Han bureaucrats cutting of progress, Han having periodic civil wars that kill half the people and all the rest of the Han stuff.
Oh that is just plain hilarious.
Talk about “End of an Age” level shifts…..
Yep, big fan of Dr.McLaughlin and his excellent historical videos. I credit him with giving me that insight.
Yeah, there were a lot of issues in the Roman Empire. But the sudden simultaneous surge of invaders – particularly from the East – went a long way toward speeding up the process of it’s collapse.
The climate splat of the late 400s-500s didn’t help.
At first glance I saw ‘climate spat’ — “Huh? They were fighting about climate 1,500 years ago?” 😛
Climate changes. That’s what it does. Destroying civilization won’t stop it.
There has been a rapid and substantial rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide content over the last 150 years. We don’t know what the long-term effects might be. Running around with hair-on-fire screeching THE SKY IS FALLING!! doesn’t accomplish anything. Basing worldwide government policy on the whining of an emotionally disturbed child is insane.
Everything I see our Fearless Leaders do is stupid and insane.
The long term effects of the rise in CO2 is that we’ve staved off the end of all life as we know it by another million years or so. See Dr.Patrick Moore’s interview “A Dearth of Carbon”.
*wags paw* CO2 is a lagging indicator. You get oceanic warming, then CO2 rises, then cooling, and CO2 decreases. Warmer water holds less CO2, just like warmer soda-pop. [No, do NOT shake the oceans to see if you can get them to fizz!]
What about dropping a Mentos asteroid in the ocean?
Only if someone says “Hey, y’all! WATCH THIS!” before impact.
Another problem that came out of China.
Close geographically, but probably not. China had been engulfed in in-fighting ever since the fall of the Han Dynasty around 200AD (technically 220AD, but the Three Kingdoms were already established in all but name and fighting amongst themselves by the time the Emperor abdicated). The country was briefly united under the Jin Dynasty, but the dynasty barely had a chance to get established before it tore itself – and the country – apart in a fratricidal civil war. It took centuries for the country to reunify after that, and the Western Roman Empire was a footnote by the time that happened.
So while the nomads in modern Mongolia probably had a lot to do with why the Huns suddenly showed up on Rome’s eastern doorstep, it probably wasn’t due to direct Chinese intervention against those nomads.
The Huns anyway. It seems that China had intervened in a civil war against the tribes, which displaced a set of them West, who then displaced another set, and so on. there’s a recent book out but it’s sitting on my desk in NYC where I’m still not allowed to go.
Even assuming that the Hsiung-Nu and the Huns are the same people, which is, um, disputed, to say the least, the Han Dynasty never did more than just repel them. They certainly never went into the outback to drive them west.
It’s far more likely that the Huns were yet another steppe nomad confederation that originated in the western Altai and for one reason or another started moving/agglomerating westward instead of eastward. By the time they got to the Roman frontiers, they were largely made up of ethnic Ostrogoths and Sarmatians as subsidiary members. (Just like the “Mongols” were mostly related-but-different Tatars (and various Turks), which is why in the West, “Tartar” is a synonym for Mongol.)
Best guess is that a lot of the steppes got drier and colder, so tribes headed for greener pastures, and then kept going toward China, the Ukraine, Hungary, Persia, et al. Because they followed the good weather and fled those tribes following behind them.
The Han tried early on to fight back against the northern nomads. The first time, the founder of the dynasty got his army surrounded, and had to negotiate his release. I think there were a couple of later attempts that only went marginally better (i.e. the survivors were able to retreat back to China after their own respective defeats).
The Han were the ones that started the tradition of marrying an Imperial Princess to the leader of the most powerful nomad group. It was cheaper than having their northern lands periodically raided.
The Han might have provided support to one side during a tribal dispute. But in that case, someone was going to lose and get displaced no matter what.
The 1177 BC book has a good overview of what we know about that mess. 🙂
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
He also has a good presentation on YT.
Thank you for this Sarah. I’m going to save this one. I’m totally disconnected from the generations that have followed mine since we had no children. I am mystified that so many of my friends allowed their children to be imprisoned by public schools.
They think they are the schools that they went to in their youth.
But that siren’s call is poison.
The only sense in which that is a legitimate excuse is that they themselves had been brainwashed to think of a construct of pure evil as something good.
No way is my grandson going to a public school. Even if the local schools in Texas stay sane. He’s going to be home-schooled.
This is the Way.
*Thumbs up*
We pulled number two son out of school after he had run into enough trouble with his grammar school math teacher that the prep school number one son had gone to wouldn’t take him. We were told he’d “have to go to public school”. My wife looked that b-tch in the eye and told her, “the atheists will not get my son.” We pulled him, home schooled him, fixed the math problem, taught him some Latin, and made him read books for a year then sent him to another, equally good, prep school where he excelled. No one believed we would do it since it’s essentially unknown among the wine moms here. Everything worked out really well and my son found out just how far my wife was willing to go. The b-tch just got fired, again.
The local news had the not-good local school district bemoaning there dramatic increase in people pulling their kids out and homeschooling. Guess 2020 was good for two lessons: 1.) This is not the schooling you went to, and 2.) homeschooling ain’t that hard, when you’re already having to do it anyway. Pick a better curriculum.
The Epoch Times’ new magazine had a great article on hybrid home-schooling. These are half-home-school and half in-class school, often with uniforms and so on. Because the parents are so involved, the kids get (thus far) the best of both worlds – access to resources that might be scarce for home-school alone, but also the ability to focus and work on their own on a variety of topics. I think it grew from the micro-schools, and a few other Odd sources.
The hybrid schools is one that has been available in the Eugene area. Classes mostly what parents of children enrolled bring. Classes like Physics, Chemistry, Geology, etc.
*Wry* I kept telling my parents about being beaten up. Their reaction was “well just ignore the bullies and they’ll stop”.
Of course, they did not stop.
Only decades later in hindsight do I know my parents did not WANT me to be able to stand up to bullies – because that might mean I’d stand up to THEM.
I wonder how many other kids were stuck in the same trap, and don’t have the insight to avoid repeating and amplifying the toxic behavior.
We FINALLY told older son to defend himself. The reason we held him back was because he was massive and we were afraid he’d accidentally kill someone.
When we gave him carte blanche, the same playground monitors who’d been ignoring the (strangely larger) kid who was beating him and had broken his glasses saw that and tried to put him in detention.
We gave them what for.
Our boy told his fellow student, “Quit talking racist trash about the black kids behind their backs or I’ll give you a fat lip.” Kid didn’t stop, got a fat lip. (Pretty sure our son had been bullied in the last school and decided, “No more!”)
He got suspended for violating the zero tolerance policy and got a five-day suspension for, “showing no remorse.” As in he told the principal (in front of my husband,) “If he does it again, I’ll paste him again.”
Later, with a new principal, he was preparing to help counsel a kid who was bullying another kid and the principal told him, “If you do anything on the school grounds, it will violate our zero tolerance policy. But if something was to happen in the parking lot of the convenience store across the street, it wouldn’t be on the school grounds and would not be a violation….”
I told him he’d just gotten permission to beat the crap out of another kid. Turned out to be unnecessary. Word got back to the bully and he had a change of heart.
In 3rd grade I did defend myself – being smaller and weaker, apparently had to fight mean. I’m told I threw one kid over a desk.
I was never allowed to raise a hand again. Go figure.
Good job!
I hope it was. But after that I was not allowed to defend myself. I don’t remember exactly what my parents did, only that it was made very clear that if I raised a hand to anyone again, I would have no home left to go to.
I was eight.
…Meaning everyone in that school system knew exactly who they could target. Rrrrgh.
I once got warned about going to prison or juvie, but nobody ever threatened any of us with serious abandonment. Argh. (Well, okay, once we were adults we were told about “as long as you’re under my roof,” but still, nobody went that far.)
Obviously the goodness in your family skipped some generations.
From what I’ve been able to research, at least 3 or 4 generations. Geh.
…And while prison or juvie was never brought up, I ended up hearing from a court record of what my father told a social worker – that he should get custody of the younger kids, because he’d let his wife raise me and I was “obviously a sociopath who belonged in an insane asylum”.
The social worker bought it, BTW. Hook, line, and charming sinker. Fortunately I was already 18 and she didn’t try to commit me.
Evil exists. No one will convince me otherwise. There are people who choose to be evil.
–
I never doubted that. Now we see it every day. The Democrats have stopped even pretending to not be evil.
You know, there was this time in elementary when I saw a teacher picking on my older brother. I stomped over to the other side of the lunch hall, and kicked the teacher in the nuts. Standing over his fallen body, I proclaimed with every fiber of my tiny, angry little body, “NOBODY picks on my brother but me!!”
I don’t remember any parental blowback from that at all. Zero.
Nor was their any blowback the time the mean girls ganged up on me, and I proved they might be better with cruel words and cutting remarks, but I had no compunction about biting them and pulling their hair out by the bloody roots. After that, there was a… significant lack of overt hostilities.
Another thing I should thank my parents for.
You’re related to younger son who took on the school bully on behalf of older son, screaming “no one beats my brother but me”. Incidentally bully now adult, still afraid of younger son
My enemies should thank their lucky stars we were before zero-tolerance policies. Because I would have taken the “You’ll be punished whether or not you defend yourself” and decides to go full scorch the earth and salt the ruins. After all, if you’re going to get punished either way, why settle for half measures?
“[…] I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they’d leave me alone.”
Exactly!
And given the current surveillance state, that’s become a default for a lot of interactions with people. You’ll only get one chance so it’s all or nothing.
Number one son was bullied when we first arrived in England. He. talked funny, is “on the spectrum” and all the rest. I told him to punch the bully in the nose. He said but I’ll get in trouble. I said, but not with me. Sometime later the kid pushed him and number one son hit him right in the nose. No blood, no foul since no one in authority saw it. End of problem. When we came back to the US, he talked funny and was still on the spectrum but my daughter was old enough to look after him. If the story is accurate she kneed some idiot in the nuts.
I had no illusions about the schools even in my day (insert old guy cough here). My wife, on the other hand, went to a school that actually believed in and promoted education. It helped that 90% of the student body were Jewish. Even so, she was under no illusions that the schools around us would be toxic for children. She understood her experience was not the norm.
You are soooooo right.
Likewise. I went to them for K-8. I would never, ever send a child there. It’s hell.
The oft-repeated saying about them being prisons to hold kids and teenagers while both parents work really isn’t a joke, especially not these days. I refer to my high school years as time served for a reason.
“I escaped [school name] in [year],” is my usual phrasing.
Thank you for the post.
I never had kids, and I see the truth of what you wrote in the adult-ish children I encounter.
Yesterday: two boys, in their 20s maybe, came to my fishing hole. Out in the mountains, on the river, three people with no one else near.
One boy wore a muzzle all the way up to his eyes. As he fished. In the heat.
When I shouted across the river “Are you wearing a muzzle?” they stood and stared at me like deer in the headlights, like caught fish. Amazed.
It’s so awful it scares me in a funny way.
I don’t quite see Marxism and mass production as separate. Marxism seems to be a natural form for apocalyptic religion in an economy of mass production. Rather as transhumanism and singularitarianism are natural in an economy of networked differentiated production, I think.
Read Kapital. You’ll never worry about it again. No, the problem lies in the rag and bone shop of the heart not in some scribbler’s rant.
I’d like to read Capital. But the last university library I had access to only had an abridged edition, and what’s the point of that? I want to watch the whole argument develop so I can see clearly where it goes wrong. Reading Keynes was something of a revelation . . .
Read the abridgment, you’re not missing anything. Kapital vol 1 is Marx essentially saying that capitalists are all greedy misers even when they’re not being greedy, that’s what surplus value is, accompanied by piles of evidence that had been collected by reformers long before and acted upon. Vol 2 and Vol 3 are his doing that Hegelian BS where he confounds his critics by pointing out that they didn’t understand his dialectical genius and he had already met their criticisms. Volume one is a turgid, confused, contradictory mass. Volumes 2 & 3 make volume one look clear, organized, and consistent.
Marx is piles of emotion long on rhetoric and short on argument — he never actually argues for anything he simply stipulates. if you want to know what the argument was about read Proudhon, or not because it’s actually stupid as Proudhon grew to understand. Proudhon was actually working class and worked a trade — he was a master printer.
GB Shaw had cut the bottom out of surplus value shortly after it was published by pointing out that it only worked if there was only one capitalist since others, seeing the profits, would drop the price and take all his business and pay the workman more as there wouldn’t be enough to go around, which is exactly what happens. ironically, the only place where Marxian surplus value actually existed was in the Marxist Leninist states.
I want to see the details of the argument. You learn things that way that you don’t learn from summaries.
No. Trust me. BGE is right. I studied the D*mn thing in school every year from 13 through college. By force. TRUST me on this.
From my experience with Marx excerpts in a cultural anthropology theory, you are missing nothing in not reading Marx. My professor included Marx only because Marx stupidity infuenced a lot of others, and the professor had a bunch of disclaimers about how unpleasant Marx was as a person, and that what Marx wrote was mostly a restatement of Hegel plus Marx’ own stupidity wrapped in a lot of needless verbiage. I’ve seen nothing to make me disagree.
Marx is important because of Lenin. Without Lenin none of us would have any idea who Marx was.
Marx needed an editor who didn’t expand on his work. He’s too prolix by half, at least. It’s got to be a German philosopher thing. I slogged through Kapital. I should get an award for endurance. I’d rather read academic economic history of the Hansa again. At least there actions had real world consequences.
Yeah, last night I was tempted to say that as a crazy blowhard who can’t manage to be organized, coherent, concise, and to the point: Maybe I should have been a native German speaker. 😀
(I haven’t read these folks, and barely speak any words of German. No doubt super super unfair to German speakers. And there had to have been German writers that could actually express an idea well.)
And there had to have been German writers that could actually express an idea well.
Clausewitz. And, um… well, there’s Clausewitz.
Try Nietzsche. That’s not to endorse all of his ideas (for one thing, he was a pioneering advocate of cultural relativism, which I think was a profound mistake); but he certainly had an appreciation for brevity. He wrote that his ambition was “to say in a sentence, in a paragraph, what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” And I’ve adopted one of his epigrams as a motto: “A curiosity such as mine is the most agreeable of all vices.”
Goethe was pretty good, too, and Heine. And Morgenstern is funny, as in the poem about a victim of an auto accident who discovers that the driver was breaking the law:
“And he comes to the conclusion
That the mishap was illusion.
For, he argues, razor witted,
That can’t be which is not permitted.”
And I’m not a big fan of Brecht, but one should not overlook his line about “If the government doesn’t trust the people, why doesn’t it dissolve them and elect a new people?”
Outside a few aphorisms, and he had a gift for them, I find Clausewitz as opaque as all the other German prose writers. I had studied a lot of Latin before a I came to German so the clunkiness of the language didn’t get in the way of appreciating the poetry. 19th century German prose, shudder. It’s not all about the language though, I think Kant being so muddled and Hegel being so ridiculous but also the official Prussian model had as much to do with it as anything else. Hegelian clap trap is as muddled in French and English as it is in German, The Austrians were not nearly so bad. They tended to use Latin letters rather than that gothic crap the German’s used anyway.
Luther.
It’s interesting that you compare wanting to read Marx to your reading Keynes. Keynes General Theory isn’t Keynesian. What we call Keynesian was actually put forward by Samuelson when he threw out all the subtleties and mathematicatized it. It then became the dogma at Harvard. Reading the General Theory does open up a lot even though the GS is another confused, turgid mess.
I believe, though i’ve never taken the time to really make the argument, that Keynes GS was just a rhetorical effort to cause Stanley Baldwin to pump money one time during the depression. I believe that Keynes would have repudiated it had he lived. I come to this through his correspondence with Hayek and Keynes’s “I change my opinions when the facts change, what do you do sir?” Keynes was a “nudger” avant la lettre as well as being a cad and bounder.
Normally, I’m all in favor of reading thinkers in full in the original but Marx doesn’t suffer in abridgment., in fact abridgment is good for him. Marx is one of those people, like the Camel, whom you like less the more you’re exposed to them. Again, there’s no argument in Marx only stipulation and a good dose of abuse.
if you insist, and I’ve warned you, the entire works of Marx are available in the original and translation at Marxists.org.
Fourth year in college, in line for matriculation. All languages together. Ahead of me, all too precious young man with long bangs and tapestry jacket, asked loudly if there were still places available in Russian, because he wanted to read Marx in the original. The clerk didn’t enlighten him. I swear I’m not making this up.
If I were the clerk, I wouldn’t have enlightened him either. Let him learn the hard way from his mistake… unlike Marx.
Oh, dear. Spouse just channeled Christopher Plummer explaining you don’t really understand Shakespeare until you read him in the original Klingon.
That’s the first thing that came to my mind, too. The second was my memory of TOS where Chekov claimed things as original Russian inventions.
Well, that was a common thing coming out of the Soviet Union at that time. 😉
That was common Russian behavior.
Vladimir Propp had to grovel for discussing how the Brothers Grimm had pioneered fairy tale collection instead of following the party line of Russian priority.
What happened to lesser lights who didn’t, I shudder to think.
Had a fellow who once seriously tried to explain to me that the Catholic church was the only true church – because the Bible was originally written in Latin . . .
The whole Bible? not just the New Testament? (Which wasn’t written in Latin either.) Shoot, portions of the Bible are far older than the Latin language!
That’s worse than the people who are convinced that the KJV is the only real translation.
No other version has as many “thou”s. It’s not authentic if it uses “you”. I say only half sarcastically.
No, it’s exactly the opposite. Industrialization and automation mean that, instead of 90% of the people toiling at subsistence-level labor to support 10% in undeserved luxury, machines do 90% of the work leading to vastly increased productivity so everybody can have luxuries. Problem is, Marxists tell those people that working for a living is ‘slavery’, so they go on strike and break the machines. We all run short of necessities, much less luxuries.
All Marxists should be shipped back 3,000 years in the past to get a taste of REAL slavery.
Neo-Marxists cry that ‘Machines take jobs away from people!’ Bullshit! Any job that can be done by a machine should be. More production with less labor cost benefits everybody in the long run, because all costs are ultimately labor costs. That’s why ‘Raise the Minimum Wage!’ is so stupid. Increasing the cost of labor makes everything cost more, so the ‘higher’ Minimum Wage won’t buy any more than the old one did.
Oh, well, that’s what you get with a pig’s understanding of economics.
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Only idiots believe they know how other people should live their lives. The stupider they are, the more strongly they believe it.
Also there is (infinity * N) amount of work that needs doing, where N is the number of sophonts. Any unemployment that isn’t transient or a person who can’t/won’t work is strong evidence that someone has been screwing around with the market. The one thing it is absolutely not evidence of is “too many people”, or “too many machine”, or whatever new twist on the same bullshit the fools come up with.
Well, actually, it’s my cat that’s been telling me to make a list of the people who are wronging us. For her, there’s 4 kinds of people. 1: People who do what she says. 2: People who leave her alone. 3: People who are on the list. And 4: People no longer on the list, who have been chopped up and trash bagged.
Don’t make my cat angry. You won’t like it when she’s angry.
You live with a treecat?
Was my thought….
The orange kitten we rescued when my daughter was 2 is named Toulouse because this was her favorite movie at the time.
My grey tabby was a feral rescue. We named her Marci. Great cat; her kidneys gave out when she was approximately 10. We then got 2 sister kittens who the animal control people found in a box, Eleanor and Marley. They are now 4. Great social cats.
Toulouse is a great name. The kids named all ours.
I was thinking while driving the other day. Luckily for the public I was alone on the road. My thoughts turned to the two greatest calamities of the 1800’s: The Origin of Species and Das Kapital. both books were used and abused by the moneyed class to manipulate and control the commoners. With Origin, it created an excuse to mistreat the poor( Social Darwinism) with the other, well I’ m typing this on my phone so I leave it to you to fill in the well-worn blanks.
Point is, the upper class will always find a reason to plant their boot on the necks of their social”inferiors” been that way since the first thugs rode up to the farmers and said, “nice farm you got here -shame if anything happened to it…”
So every once in a while the nobles must be reminded why ‘Nobless Oblige’ was not a recommendation -but a warning.
I would say Freud more than Marx and certainly more then Darwin is the primary source of discontent in our civilization.
Well, perhaps. My thought is that Darwin and Marx had the greater impact. As far as the body count, Marx is probably the winner due to the organized slaughter. Who could really know how many victims were caused by Darwin’s book. Children fed into textile mills. Miners coughing up their lungs while the Astor’s and Rockefeller types added on to their second mansions. The smug talk over brandy and cigars about how the survival of the fittest included fixing the game so the poor only rolled snake eyes.
Yep, humanity in full flower.
Miners were coughing up their lungs as long as they were mines. And children in the textile mills were often better off than children on the farms. I think Darwin can’t take the fall for that.
When a mine is so deadly that it is closed because “too many slaves died” (in pre-Roman Persia), you know things had to be horrible. (The minerals had a lot of really nasty heavy metals in them. Like mercury, arsenic, and lead. Rough on anyone in the area.)
Outdated scholarship.
Critical Pharmacy Theory says that toxicity is an oppressive concept.
Alas, I can totally see an “academic” paper on something like “The Whiteness of Toxicology: The Othering of Traditional Knowledges of Healing.” Because Native peoples truly know better, just like wymyn, how to live in harmony with the world and how Western medicine and chemistry are just imperialistic impositions on Native bodies . . .
I’ve got to stop reading eco-critical and eco-feminist paper synposes.
just like wymyn
Random question but why does sticking extra “y”s in a word make it more feminist? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Your mistake is assuming that anything about radical feminism is Reasonable. 😈
It’s a joke from the early-mid 1990s, when feminists (votes, equal work for equal pay, stopping requiring sexual services as a condition of employment/promotion) were trying to distance themselves from the off-the-deep-end activists who rejected everything associated with the Y chromosome, including the “man/men” part of woman/women. So “wymyn” and “wymynists” they became, at least behind the radicals’ backs. Then the fringe took over . . .
I blame Uncle Bonsai. https://music.apple.com/us/album/myn-ynd-wymyn/289803597
I’ll be happier once I stop doing X IRL, because there were a bunch of things on Y that I edited out of that comment.
And frankly, I’ve really liked some of the people I may be hearing stuff from, so I could be being quite unfair, and just going from zero to enraged simply from how touchy I am now.
If a ‘scholar’ was dumb enough to say such a thing, and if university administrative bureaucrats were dumb enough to endorse said scholar on behalf of the university, you can bet that taking in a container of strong poison, giving the explanation to various persons, would get you in trouble for asking them if they would take a sip. I don’t know if the idea of folks refusing or drinking is more disturbing.
At this point I think you should write one to illustrate the total lunacy of modernist scholarship and send it to the Bee…
Kinda has been done, and badly contaminated the discussion of the insanity of scholarship.
The thing about dogs in the park and rape?
That was one of a bunch that some graduate students decided to do as ‘research’ to demonstrate that there were journals that were pretty uncritical and accepting. Someone finally asked, and they fessed up.
Basic issue, as humor, the folks who would get a laugh out of the ‘as much or more work than a real paper’ style of parody, are mostly themselves academics. And, some of them are exposed to too much terrible work to find it very funny, and many of the rest prefer to do real papers.
That was Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose as part of an organized hoax attack on woke academics, not random grad students out for the lulz.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/from-sexist-potatoes-to-rape-culture-at-dog-parks-the-story-behind-the-hoax-against-academic-journals/
Looking forward to the inevitable chewfest when you say something that manages to annoy the entire blog population…..
Eh, it was a pretty lame one.
For someone who doesn’t like Marx, he sure drank deep of dude’s ideas.
That is why the chewfest isn’t happening now.
That is why the chewfest will happen eventually.
[Looks at comments further down.] It’s starting already…
C.S. Lewis pointed out the idea of “social evolution,” or “progress,” entered poetry before the “Origin of Species,” was published. The concepts predated the theory, meaning the theory had a warm environment to grow in.
And of course “Social Darwinism” is just the “Aristocratic Principle” by another more “scientific” name.
IE The idea that some people are better than other people is a very very old idea.
Years ago I read an essay which made the argument that Social Darwinism seems to be one of those positions that everyone loves to attack, but no one seems to have actually believed. (could call it a Tide Pod position)
I don’t know if I’d say *no one*, but it does seem to be a few orders of magnitude more people gleefully attacking strawmen and dog whistles then actual believers.
I have actually read works by both of the key social Darwinists: Herbert Spencer from England and William Graham Sumner from the United States. Neither of them is much like the common caricatures of social Darwinism. In today’s political terminology, both of them are fairly close to being libertarians. Sumner coined the phrase “the forgotten man” in a lecture: “As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X.” In that speech, C is the forgotten man: the taxpayer who supports schemes for helping other people at government expense.
And thus Amity Shlaes borrowing the quote for her book on the early New Deal.
Spencer’s ideas got picked up by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and warped. Chamberlain was the name I was trying to remember last night.
Some of the 19th century intellectuals had some good ideas, but ruined them for a lot of audiences with originators or populizers who picked an incorrect direction to take them.
Innate criminality actually seems to be a real thing.
There seems to be something to do with underpinnings of personality, which develops by the time of birth. Criminality is partly rooted in personality, so it might make sense that there are in fact people born criminal. (Of course, knowing that is something that can’t be determined at birth, and the appropriate and reasonable test for criminality is after an offense.)
But, the implementation they were chasing was a biological theory, and they were looking into measuring it, and heredity. So, of course they put a lot of effort into wrong things because of it, and now people are skeptical for fairly defensible reasons.
Speaking of innate criminality, City Journal just posted a retrospective of the work of James Q. Wilson, the political scientist who originated “broken windows policing”. Worth a read. Just like the teacher who agreed with the critic of “whole word” reading but said “we’re just at that point in the cycle”, it would appear that we’re just at that point in the cycle where going easy on crooks and street criminals is going to be prevalent no matter how stupid it sounds.
https://www.city-journal.org/james-q-wilson-criminal-justice
Yeah. That is part of why it is good to point out that while I was correct about a lot of Criminal Justice Reform being bankrupt, I am still nuts. When ‘the pendulum’ swings, we want the movement ‘damped’. If we can avoid going too far to the other extreme, perhaps we can avoid swinging back from that extreme very far, and possibly stabilize things somewhere reasonably sane.
Okay, the real world does not obey such neat theoretical models, but I suspect that the feeling may still be sound.
So, that means there is such as anthropogenic ideological climatist …change. Which means we need to pass a $7T package to study and develop ways to manage and defend current idealogical patterns – we only have 12 years to save humanity from total over proliferation of thoughts!
On one hand, all that child labor was going on well before Darwin’s theories saw print; the textile factories were getting started in the 18th century. And on the other hand, working in a textile factory was a lot better and safer for children than working on a farm, or in a mine, or being a chimney sweep, let alone begging, prostitution, or theft—all of them preindustrial jobs. Or just dying of hunger or malnutrition. It’s easy to look back and be horrified, but from the perspective of the time factory work was a chance to be better off.
Versus subsistence farming, factory work is better at ALL times. Those Vietnamese peasants aren’t being forced to sew sneakers for pennies a day at gunpoint, after all.
About 20 years ago I took a class in tapestry taught by a Guatemalan woman. The complex, gorgeous brocades are vanishing because a young Guatemalan woman has a choice: spend 20 years improving her traditional back.strap skills and trying to sell the textiles for something close to their true worth, or walking to the shoe factory where she gets a steady paycheck, enough to build a good cinderblock house with a solid roof, have a pump to draw water and the money to buy the kids school uniforms. Not really much of a choice.
I’ve done enough “organic” farm work of the “can’t see to can’t see” variety to tell you there were many families who deliberately sent kids and young unmarried women to textile mills because the work was less likely to kill you. Also the cheaper thread and thus cloth produced by said mills saved a lot of lives, because there was, among many other results, 1) cloth for bandages, 2) more clothes to change into when you got soaked, hence less risk of hypothermia and pneumonia, 3) more clothes let you have more clean clothes when washing was still a lot of work, hence better hygiene and fewer infections.
Less reselling of the clothes of people who died of contagious disease, too
Brr. Yeah.
“Mass production has a boring sameness.”
It is called SURVIVAL! Bring. It. On!
‘Boring sameness’ is a FEATURE!
When you buy a box of 12-penny nails, you kind of expect all of them to be the same size. All 9/16″ combination wrenches had better be the same size. Any 3/8″ drive socket is supposed to fit any 3/8″ socket wrench. Every .45 ACP cartridge is supposed to feed and shoot in any .45 ACP gun. And so on.
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It takes a LOT of education to make somebody that stupid.
Aye, where This Modern Age falls down is in *inexpensive* (due to mass-produced computing power!) individualization. I *should* be able to order pants* (trousers) that do NOT need taking-in/taking-out/hemming/whatever and not pay an exorbitant premium for the ‘privilege’. Sew-On-Demand. But there is is no, only “SOD off!” (and deal with stuff that’s Not Right because it Needs Work, or pay an exorbitant variation on the ‘tailor tax” if one is not of Bog Standard Size. Pfffui!!!
* Look, I’m not even going on about being tail-friendly, here. I *GET* that. But simple SIZING is something that should have been a non-issue 30 years ago at the LATEST.
Depends on feed ramp design. 😉
Ah, Tim, you’re citing Spencer and his followers, not Darwin. “Social Darwinism” had nothing to do with what Darwin actually described and argued.
Ah. Bullshit on the children fed into the mines. Kids in farms were taking care of cattle by FOUR. The mills were safer, the kids ate better. Miners…. Yeah, it’s a shitty job. always was. Nothing to do with the Astors or Rockfellers.
Seriously. How can you condemn Marxism when spouting Marxist distortions of history.
Could you please go read The Forgotten Man and Eat the Rich and then come back?
Rockefellers were oil, not mines.
I meant mills. He’s conflating two centuries anyway
He is conflating a hell of a lot more than that 😛
Farms have always been dangerous for children. Was watching Program the BBC made where they had 3 folks trying to live on a victorian farm. One issue was feeding the livestock in the winter. Main solution was some root plants like turnips only blander and larger. But you couldn’t just feed these giant roots to the livestock. It had to be chopped up. This being the victorian era there was a machine for it. It looked like someone had Heironymous Bosch draw a cross between a branch chopper and a mangle used for drying out clothes. It was giving me the willies watching the 30 something historians using this thing. But almost certainly a young boy would have gotten that chore. Mess up and best case you lose a finger or two. More likely hand and wrist take major damage, and unless some one acts fast you’d bleed out. Sounds to me like working in a factory even a victorian one with belts running everywhere and dust flying would be a step up…
I think Alfred Kinsey deserves a share of the blame.
Yes, and at the same time they act as if we are children. Can you imagine the scoldings we are going to get when Kamala takes over?
They expect to act like children and be treated like adults, and that others will act like adults and be treated like a child.
This. *Thumbs up*
I’ll emulate HerbN and flaunt my +10 Death Metal Shirt of Indifference.
😀 I want one.
But where do you get them in this day and age, where live music is mostly prohibited? Maybe I’ll go check my t-shirt drawer and see if my Armed for Apocalypse shirt has hidden properties.
I’m sticking with me OCPs and a Culpepper Minuteman shirt.
Dang, now I need one of those Culpeper shirts, too.
Go to Howitzer Clothing. I recommend them.
I used to do the same with the kids during scouts or sports. My biggest was siblings climbing chain link fences. Every time a parent said “I said they could” my response was “Oh. Um. Gee. You see your other child’s coach is blind in one eye from doing just this as a child. But you know best …” (100% True) Then, the child get pulled of the fence and swatted (which I thought was unfair, the parent, after all, gave permission for the action). What I didn’t mention was that had the same accident occurred today the damage could be repaired, probably, maybe. Not the point, any injury is possible. Even know of a child who has a scar from his hand being sliced open doing exactly that. Wasn’t around to tell the child “don’t do that”. Was around to inform his mother that that is how hubby lost his sight in his one eye. (No. Not nice. Why are you asking?) … My BIL sister’s youngest son.
Yes. Even today. I see a small child doing something dangerous, I say something. I can’t stop it. I could report, depending. Never came to that, yet.
Yeah. Holding one sibling together on a drive to the emergency room is and I do not recommend.
Hubby is the youngest of 4, by 4 years. His mother was a RN, which probably, in 1956, meant the difference of actually keeping the eye, and not. As it is, with medical advances, about 34 years ago, looked at closing the torn iris, to do away with the light sensitivity he has. They tested to see if he actually could “see” if the iris worked properly. He couldn’t. Since he is super sensitive to the possibility of “sympathetic rejection” by the good eye, this was not perused. Have not researched more recently.
And right after “No”, the next thing they’ve never heard is “think this through and explain your reasoning”. Facts, not Feelz. Argh.
Hangs together, but something has been bothering me. Why now?
In superficial hindsight, some of this looks like long term discipline.
The most obvious ‘spoiled child’ motivation for ‘now’ is ‘fear of mortality’, but I’m not sure what this would be supposed to do about that.
Conclusion I have reached is that my objection comes from ignorance about the past behavior of these people. Given that learning more about these people than I already do would probably make me much less happy, skipping is probably wise. If I choose not to learn, I should expect to misread the situation, and do a bad job of boiling it down into theory.
That occurred to me too. Covid-19 is mostly dangerous to the elderly. I think I’ve heard median fatality age is around 80.
And then you look at the average age of Congress, and just how many of them are pushing 80 themselves.
And then you look at the average age of Congress, and just how many of them are pushing 80 themselves.
And just like that, I’m on Team COVID.
Between the age, and the lack of religion – in the sense of a traditional, transcendent religion – fear of mortality might be on the right track. If the material world is everything, and there’s nothing greater than you Out There, well, dying might well be the thing you struggle hardest to avoid. That also explains why “My Legacy!!!” is so vitally important. Not your children, not good works that you’ve quietly supported and watched flower, not your transcendent faith, but your name on laws and buildings, and your name making other people “do good.”
Dang it, Bob, you’re making sense again. 🙂
I think people were so busy discussing Pelosi’s narrative around January 6th, that they didn’t spend as much time asking themselves what was really going on with January 6th.
When you really look at the details, asking yourself what happened, and why, it is a little bit of a mystery.
Okay, obviously, it was another round of what the Democrats have been doing with tame police forces, and choreographed riots, only with the media propaganda flipped the other way around. But the Capitol Police mean the Speaker of the House mean Pelosi. Why? Why now, and why not before? What exactly is her game plan for this, what does she get out of it? If it is her own personal power, why are the other Democrats so cooperative?
This is one reason I was pretty sure of the PRC model. Before I realized that HRC might still be in the game, I figured it had to be Pelosi’s own power lust, and wanting to participate before her death.
Now? It might be too paranoid, but the vax push may be a result of crazy thinking on their part about immortality via baby smoothies. Clearly, they have deeply incorrect views of technological development, assuming that funding is the only obstacle, not complexity or physical possibility.
We know the last from their other behavior with funding, not because of my specific crazy theory.
Stoicism? The sort that values, “one’s reputation in the eyes of good men?” for values of good?
Well said as always, and that image is exactly what we’re dealing with here all right… It’s just a shame these spoiled brats have the equivalent of loaded rocket launchers thanks to their institutional power even if they’re running low on ammo these days. As always, I hope all of us can survive this more or less intact, and I am feeling a little less pessimistic about that. Just a little, though.
In many respects, the worst part is waiting for that moment when we can finally see what’s coming.
Isn’t that the truth, especially when you’re always prepared to be disappointed by the people who should be willing to stand up for freedom in some form or another.
They’re running around screaming because actors like the foreign heads of government, members of their own political party, and others are not doing what they’re SUPPOSED to do, dammit! They had these beautiful plans about how everything would go once they were in charge (and as Sarah said, they are the good people, so these were good plans), and now nobody is cooperating! How are they supposed to bring forth Heaven on Earth if you damn hoi polloi won’t cooperate?
I do think that one of their biggest surprises has been the criticism from the foreign leaders. Like somebody said above, talking about chatting with the liberal neighbors, I’m seeing folks in my blue neighborhood start to express at least a little, tiny bit of doubt about how things are going. Liberal friends from college are starting to see the light as well.
It will get worse, and a lot more bumpy before it gets better. I am hopeful however that we, the people, can minimize the damage.
At least the British, the French and the Australians are criticizing our regime, even if for different things. Of course, the criticism doesn’t make it int the media much. But the border problems, Afghanistan FUBAR ( With the start of a steady drumbeat of sexual assault s in camps of those already in the US), energy prices skyrocketing ( wait for winter and natural gas) , a worker shortage, supply bottlenecks ,shortages and just starting up serious inflation that will be really taking off if the Junta get their $4.5 trillion plus plan in place. All this damage In eight months…and the ongoing CRT/ Woke crap push. The next several years should prove to any thinking person that the illegally installed Junta and all of their party must go. Pardon the rant.
It was amazing how the middle-aged woman behavior kicked in, as soon as I became one. And yes, that’s exactly when I started telling kids not to do stuff.
Usually there’s no imminent danger taking place, so I don’t have the command voice come out of my throat.
That said, I’m really starting to worry about how many parents let their kids stand up on tall objects or in moving shopping carts, when one can reasonably expect that this will not end well. There was one case where a really little kid was doing it on a stool that was tall and backless, while being watched and applauded by his family (two older men of apparently Middle Eastern background). I wasn’t working, and frankly I was afraid the little kid would fall for sure if he was distracted or scared by me, so I just sort of shuddered and went on. Apparently nothing bad happened that day, but ugh.
That said, a lot of kids are well-behaved, self-possessed, outgoing, and generally doing well. It’s just that there are others who aren’t.
Tonight on Laura Ingraham’s show they had Kurt Schlicter on to talk about an atrocious ‘red-flag law’ buried in one of the military appropriation amendments. A military court can arbitrarily cancel a service member’s 2nd Amendment rights.
So, the folks who are supposed to shoot guns for the politicians, can’t be trusted to own guns.
I…got nothing. There aren’t words to express such a sheer concentrated level of stupid.
Mary has the right of it. “They act like spoiled children, and demand to be treated as adults.”
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There but one greater sin than to be right when those in power are wrong — proving it.
And a certain US representative who was career military . . . voted for it. I’m not voting for him again (didn’t vote for him in the primary, either.)
I saw that. Very disappointing.
One eye?
I’m slowly becoming convinced that he is just like all (80%) of the NAVSPECWARCOM alumni … Hair gel, etc, *shrugs*.
The one I’m thinking of is a freshman rep., also from Texas.
Just took a look at the RINOs who voted for it via GOA. Was there a R Texan who didn’t?
This week I learned that horses are racist.
We need a new planet, because Planet Clown is hostile to intelligent life.
BLINK?
Border Patrol.
By this point, “racist” has as much connection with race as “lousy” does with lice.
There was a picture of some border patrol members on horseback chasing Haitian migrants. The angle was such that it kind of looked like the BP were whipping the Haitians with the reins (they weren’t).
Our betters, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the solution to this non-problem is to ban horses.
As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.
Because it’s clearly the fault of the horses there’s a border crisis. It certainly can’t be the people in charge of the border, because one of them is Kamala Harris.
“ Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.”
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”
The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”
It started when some Illegals tried to grab the reins of the horses that some of the Border Patrol were riding and some idiots decided that the Border Patrol were trying to whip the illegals (they were pulling the reins out of the illegals’ reach).
Apparently the idiots are getting worse.
Or the brazenly malicious are estimating common sense worse.
Saw video. Illegals grabbed horses by the bridle, obviously trying to gain control over the horse. (Presumably intending to use said horse for a speedy escape.)
Too bad they weren’t trained as warhorses.
A few years back, while at a Chinese buffet restaurant, I was fixing myself one of those miniature soft-serve cones. A ten-year old kid came up to me and struck me in the arm, nearly making me drop my frozen treat.
I turned and said, rather loudly and unapologetically, “I beg your pardon!” and he ran off. Whereupon his mother came up and excused his behavior because he was “autistic.” As if that made it okay for him to misbehave violently.
I don’t buy that as an excuse. People need to have manners, even if challenged. That kid, if he tries that with someone his own size/age, may end up with broken bones and blood leakage.
That’s the problem with many of our “fellow travelers”. They don’t see the need for themselves to behave to a standard. And, as classic Narcissists, they demand we follow their misinformed, warped, and loony caricature of our standards.
Bill Whittle wrote about this in his old EjectEjectEject blog. It’s only available via the wayback machine now:
Sanctuary I
https://web.archive.org/web/20060115044857/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000125.htmlSantuary II
https://web.archive.org/web/20051226080627/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000126.htmlMay God bless us, every one.
*Facepalms* And this is where a lot of autistics would tell you, “No, that is not okay, for exactly the reason you mentioned.” Parents are supposed to teach their kids how to move in society without doing these things. That woman was failing. But no, blame the kid instead of admitting she needed to go over public behavior more….
Thank you. And this was in a very affluent neighborhood, so I fully expect to read about him a few years from now… [insert sad look here]
His mom sounds like the kind of enabler that leads to people like, oh, a person who is no longer welcome at LibertyCon. The individual justified their behavior “I’m on the spectrum. I can’t read body language,” and so on. Hint: When every year multiple people ask/tell you not to do [that], you shouldn’t do [that].
I am very happy that “on the spectrum” and “Asperger’s Syndrome” didn’t exist as a diagnosis in the 1960-70 time era. Those like me who would likely have been diagnosed as such were told “Grow Up!” in no uncertain terms and had to deal with it. Almost all my social behaviors are learned behaviors by carefully observing what other’s do- and mimicking. I’ve taken the diagnostic tests widely available for self diagnosis on the internet. No doubt in my military mind I’d have been diagnosed.
Not being diagnosed meant I had to learn how to live and function- there was no handy excuse. And when you score in the 99th percentile on all standardized tests- teachers assumed any problem you had getting along with others was your fault. They were wrong, of course. But them’s the breaks.
One of my daughter’s HS friends was diagnosed with Asperger’s. I met him a few times. The diagnosis was his crutch. He reminded me of me. In fact, he reminded my daughter of me. It’s always part of you. He needed to throw away his crutch and learn how to walk.
The usual human tendency to go with one of two systems which don’t work very well strikes again!
“Just force them to be normal without ever dealing with the problem” will work for some, but others will never clue in, and be destroyed instead.
“Make them as bad as possible” doesn’t work to a degree that I’ve seen some autists speculate — and I am tempted to agree — that it is a normie-karen scheme to render harmless and destroy those horrible non-normie people.
The idea of having Standards, and then explaining Why to the people who don’t get it, maybe even finding one of those people who is on the borderline and can translate….. well that just ain’t kosher man; that could actually solve the problem.
That is sad. Drat.
I am reasonably certain that had I been born in the 1980s instead of the 1950s, I would have been labeled “autistic”. As it was, about 2nd or 3rd grade, at least one school psychologist told my parents I needed “special education”. Back then that meant sending me to a school for the delinquent. That scared me enough that, reasoning my IQ test scores were the reason, I actually started faking the tests to appear less intelligent.
It probably did not help that I am mildly dyslexic. I always read back a number someone gives me just to be sure I didn’t swap any adjacent locations. My brain *still* tries to spell “their” as “thier” and “the” as “teh”. To me spellcheck is as much a blessing as auto-correct is a blight.
My childishly naive efforts seem to have helped since I stayed out of the special school. Fortunately the University I attended did not care about such educational witchcraft and only looked at my SAT scores and High School GPA. So I guess I grew up OK though some here might disagree.
I’d say you lucked out. The Gifted and Talented programs I ran into were all about the teachers getting to show off the “freakishly smart” kids – and yes, they put it that way.
That is probably true. The attempt to hide my IQ was certainly naive but my 8 or 9 year old mind latched onto the IQ tests as the reason. Very possibly just the Availability Heuristic (which I know nothing about then) but, who knows? I’ve read about really disturbing theories floating around in the 50s and 60s. I don’t know know if there were any programs for the gifted back then but I do remember some of the scary stories about how smart kids fared in the “special” schools.
I’d like to think I was being clever but luck works too.
It takes both. You have to be clever, you have to work hard, and then you just have to get lucky. Luck won’t do you any good without the other two.
I ran into a tiny bit of it in the early 1960s. A few of us (can’t remember the grade, maybe 5th) were given some time in an unused room. We were preparing some form of skit that was western themed (mind you, this was Metro Midwest…). $CLUELESS_TEACHER came in as we were doing the horse-riding section (complete with stick-ponies) and berated us “for playing during school hours”.
End of experimental program.
At which point, I was still the Odd, geeky with poor coordination and a couple of friends (who tended to be Odd, too).
I kept a lower profile in high school. Had some more friends (very large HS, with a decent population of Odds), but I didn’t go the AP class stuff, but did some blue collar classes (drafting, metal shop, and data processing–vintage 1960–languages were an assembler and COBOL.) My advpeisor thought I was ruining my future–wrong…
I swear one of my co-workers is number dyslexic. If a part isn’t racked in the right spot, we have to check other spots with transposed numbers to be sure that it isn’t truly missing. This is not helped by the fact that our stock computer regularly lies to us about our inventory status.
My sister, the Masters level mechanical engineer, is slightly mathematics dyslexic. She doesn’t transpose numbers, but the symbols will transpose or rotate/flip.
Didn’t realize it until college, when a professor noted that her mistakes would be of a simplistic type. Adding where the formula said to subtract, or other simple mistake.
She learned to double check all of her work.
The problem with almost all inventory software is GIGO.
“The problem with almost all
inventorysoftware is GIGO.”FTFY.
Not helped by the fact that some of our inventory ‘grows legs’.
There is a reason that, while I do have a legitimate label for some of my problems, I do not tell people that I have X, and that they should or must make allowances for my bad behavior. Or at least, I am not doing so here.
It doesn’t actually help anyone, and it makes things worse for everyone.
People sensitive and thoughtful enough to make productive accommodations for weird people will do so, without needing to have the labels explained, or to have the accommodations prescribed in advance. Because treating individuals like individuals. People who aren’t into giving others consideration are mostly not worth asking. Okay, bureaucracies are horrible and may have to have flexibility built in.
One of the things that did me good was a guy I didn’t know trying to teach me how to shake hands properly.
Add me to the face-palms–
our son would be classified as autistic if he was sent to public school. He’s definitely got the geeky odd from both sides, and cranked way up on the intellect but way down on the social stuff, but good heavens that would be a “mom drags him back by his collar, loudly explains why you don’t do that, and informs him he must apologize and he doesn’t get dessert” type behavior.
I’ve noticed that classifying someone as autistic is a popular reason to warehouse them. (Which terrifies me, since the stuff I had issues with as a kid? Pretty much right up there for a girl to be classified and warehoused; missed the “spectrum” designation by just a few years.)
I’d be classified as “on the spectrum” today. Because smart, socially-awkward introvert with a “kick-me” sign on her back is the same as “born with non-standard wiring,” as far as the people seeking funding seem to be concerned.
About 15-20 years ago, I was diagnosed as having Asperger syndrome.
So I’m on the spectrum.
In some ways, I wished I knew it before and perhaps I could have worked on the problem it causes.
In other ways, from what I’ve been hearing I’m glad that I wasn’t.
Note, I graduated from High School in 1972.
Also note: I don’t like excuses about behavior so I don’t make excuses now about my problem.
My mom and dad both used a lot of tactics for explaining things that “normal” kids pick up automatically, or just accepted without question– most of them were things that his mom and her dad had learned from family.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that one size fits all is going to be a REALLY bad fit for some people, even before the issues of stripping away manners. (Which work very nicely for adjusting to ‘spectrum’ behavior.)
One of the crueler jokes of recent history is the attacks from all sides on certain types of nerds, or at least “socially awkward” guys. They didn’t know how to be polite or how to behave around women, so they took old movies and tv shows as a guide.
Annnnnnd promptly got a social flamethrower to the face with mocking of “muh lady *tips fedora*”.
Those non-American countries are just so more civilized.
Free clue: if anyone was wondering when a good start shooting point was, that qualifies.
Well, you can vote your way into Socialism; but you do have to shoot your way out…
Poland and Mongolia would like a word with you.
Again. ai dot mee dot nu.
Australian. Conservative. Of course, your discretion on whether you trust him as a source on Australia being as bad as it is presented as being in the media.
He’s just gotten banned on Twitter for saying that a specific (Australian?) politician should resign or be thrown into a volcano. Twitter thread apparently a lot of libs praising the politician for covid alarmist lockdown extremism.
Pixy Misa, who does Ace’s technical support, and who has a tech post that goes up very early US time (but at a very reasonable hour if you live in Australia), has been posting the occasional update regarding Australia. He lives there, so he’s got a good view of things in his area. Based on his comments, what he’s been seeing isn’t as bad and/or compliant as what’s being depicted in the media. I can’t remember which part of the country he lives in, though.
Well, what do you expect from “the most comprehensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in history”?
Only about 600 more counties to be audited…
Expect the “opioid deaths” to spike again– there’s a massive increase in fake pain killers being sold as under-the-counter real stuff or just smuggled posing as the real stuff, containing over the deadly-to-most-people 2mg of fentanyl. (A really big guy can survive up to 3mg, sometimes.)
https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2021/09/27/dea-issues-public-safety-alert
Some also include meth.
Warning, PSA is very light on numbers. Part of that is because it’s really hard to quantify ‘amount,’– is it value, raw drugs, pounds, individual pills, what?– and partly because it’s a freaking PSA and I swear folks go through to REMOVE useful information from those. You can get better information by searching for “COUNTERFEIT PILLS FACT SHEET”. It’s the slightly more informative version of the PSA.
It can also be really hard to tell if something is a counterfeit pill or “just” a home-made pill that looks a little bit like a normal pill in bad light, and if THIS bag of pills was actually made to have non-lethal doses, or if the guy making it was just really bad at getting the stuff to spread, or if they stole someone else’s supply and mixed the stuff together, or….
If you know someone you suspect might be buying any prescription pills under the counter, please warn them; even adderall and xanax are sometimes imitated and even if they trust their supplier, it doesn’t mean someone up the line didn’t screw with their supply.
The International Lord Of Hate has a new post about the election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Even with everything they weren’t allowed to check, they’ve found 57,000 ‘problematic’ votes in the least suspect county. Big Media is falling all over itself trying to cover up the results.
There won’t be elections next year. People might fill out ballots, and submit them, but the results will have nothing to do with actual voters actually voting.
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Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of uncontrolled voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!